In Colaba, where Mumbai’s colonial facades now accommodate cafés, boutiques and private galleries in rapid succession, APRE Art House has moved into a heritage building that feels unusually resistant to polish. The new space at Arsiwala Mansion, opening with the group exhibition Apparitions on May 14, retains its exposed wooden beams, towering arched windows and a certain roughness of scale that alters the pace at which art is encountered.
For APRE, which spent three years operating from Third Pasta Lane, the expansion signals a sharper institutional confidence. “The move into Arsiwala Mansion marks an important shift in how we think about scale, display, and audience experience,” says gallery director Prerna S.M. Jain. The architecture, she explains, allows the gallery to work with “large-format works, immersive installations, and practices that require a more considered relationship to architecture.”
That relationship between body and space becomes central to Apparitions, a twelve-artist exhibition curated by Colombo-based curator Pramodha Weerasekera. Bringing together artists from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the exhibition circles around memory, displacement and political afterlives without reducing them to a single regional narrative. Instead, the show lingers in ambiguity. Ghosts appear here less as supernatural figures than as residues of histories that continue to structure contemporary life.
Weerasekera’s curatorial premise draws from unresolved pasts that refuse closure. “The exhibition approaches the idea of the ‘ghost’ not simply as metaphor, but as a condition of persistence,” Jain says, “where images, archives, and lived experiences continue to surface over time.”
Several works return to familial archives. Aakriti Chandervanshi reconstructs the life of a great aunt through photographs discovered after her death, embedding floral motifs around domestic images that hover between affection and estrangement. Naira Mushtaq’s paintings wrestle with inherited memories of Partition, rendering figures that appear suspended between presence and disappearance. Elsewhere, T. Krishnapriya revisits the material remnants of Sri Lanka’s civil war through embossed works inspired by her family’s letterpress archive.
The exhibition’s strongest moments emerge through material tension. Cyanotypes, ceramics, embroidery and archival fragments occupy the gallery with varying degrees of fragility and weight. In the cavernous new space, intimacy is never entirely lost. Instead, the exhibition proposes that historical violence often survives through texture, gesture and repetition long after official narratives have moved on.
What: Apparitions
When: May 15 to June 6, 2026
Where: APRE Art House
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