From Kolkata street games to childhood memories, everything finds a space in this group installation exhibition

When you talk of Kolkata streets, it’s all about the aesthetics, food, people and adda which is experienced through all the six senses that one possesses. Bringing all these sensorial emotions into one place is ADDA: The Third Space, an ongoing exhibition at the Tri Art & Culture curated by St+art India Foundation. Making street culture the crux of the displays, the installations rotate around the ideologies and perceptions of urban belonging, movement, rest, structure, and the public and the private. The gallery is transformed into a living, breathing museum which inhabits within itself a space for community formation and dialogue generation.

This series of artistic installation in Kolkata is based on street sensations

What draws attention is that not just the gallery spaces but the entire outer façade of the gallery has been pulled in to be a part of the display. Khatra’s A threshold Opening, which is across the windows of the building is a linguistic intervention of English and Bangla scripts; languages which are so often heard on the streets of the city and lends the landscape its visual poetics.

Into The Shared Bed, by how are you feeling studio is a discourse in imagining the private space for public acts. The installation invites visitors to sit on the bed and one’s stillness or movements on the bed forms a collective sense of togetherness. Through material vocabulary Anikesa Dhing’s, Towards an archive of taste is all about returning to your childhood with momentous joys provided by candies and sugar.

Nabi’s Masquerade of Mirage draws from anime aesthetics and folk motifs transforming the staircase into a playful space and making the viewers reflect on what they choose to see, to conform to and to ignore.

Another  interesting exhibit Exposing Scratches and Smells of Every Corner is a collaboration between three artists – ZERO, Deep Adhikary and Dr. Ishita Dey representing a toilette-kitchen scratch room. Hinting at the politics of everyday space it spotlights labour, caste and gender.

The exhibition culminates with a peaceful participatory set-up by Sethu(ram)an and Padmanabhan on the terrace. Titled To Pawn a Listening for Porous Futures, the audio-visuals point to street games and imagines the chessboard having only pawn pieces.

ADDA: The Third Space is on display till January 4, 2026

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