This Delhi art exhibition is on cinema language through film posters

At Arthshila, Delhi, Hindi cinema reappears not as a spectacle but as an after-image. The exhibition ‘Duniya Parchhaiyon Ki’ (The World of Shadows) turns away from movie screens to look at what lingers — the traces, echoes, and re-imaginings that spill into everyday life. Curated by noted film historian Ashish Rajadhyaksha, the show is a layered journey through the material, emotional, and sonic residues of popular Hindi cinema.

“Hindi cinema is not just narrative,” Rajadhyaksha says. “It’s a shared cultural memory — a form of citizenship almost. We claim our right to exist through our right to see films.” The idea of ‘cinematic citizenship’ runs through the three-act exhibition, which transforms Arthshila into a shifting, immersive environment of sound, image, and memory.

Curated by noted film historian Ashish Rajadhyaksha, the show is a layered journey

Drawing from the Takshila Art Collection, the exhibition brings together more than 120 artifacts — vintage posters, lobby cards, song booklets, and ephemera that once advertised or accompanied films across India. But these are not just collectors’ items. Many are copies of copies, reissued when films travelled from metropolitan theatres to small-town screens and eventually to the DVD and VCD era. “The art market only values the original poster,” Rajadhyaksha explains. “But I found these later versions — these re-runs — far more interesting. They tell the story of how cinema circulates and mutates.”

That circulation becomes the show’s grammar. The posters — their reds, yellows, and hand-painted exaggerations — are paired with installations, videos, and sound works that echo their urgency. The industrial estate Okhla, where the exhibition is located, becomes an active metaphor: once an industrial hub, now a site of recycling and reinvention. “Okhla is full of junk,” Rajadhyaksha says. “Digital junk, industrial junk, but from that waste, new forms emerge. That’s what cinema has always done too.”

Out of the shadows

The exhibition unfolds over three floors, each conceived as an act.

Act I: Ik Aag Ka Dariya Hai opens with the archive — where romance, secrecy, and desire meet the urge to preserve. Forty-one posters are grouped in five themes, alongside Yashaswini Raghunandan’s three-channel video ‘The Archive/Bakso Ka Khel’ and her six-channel sound work ‘Samples Speak Easy/Sunah To Hoga’, featuring Neelansh Mittra. The works play on retrofitted cathode-ray screens, surrounded by recycled strips of film posters handwoven in Noida’s Rickshaw-Recycle unit — literal threads of cinematic memory. ‘Aage Kaagaz Par Padhiye’, an installation based on the collection of film historian Ravikant, adds another layer of archival intimacy.

Act II: Siyaah Raat ke Humsafar turns to the shadows — the world of secrecy, fear, and the supernatural that runs through Hindi cinema’s visual vocabulary. Here, recycled imagery and eerie soundscapes explore what remains unseen, reflecting cinema’s tendency to both reveal and conceal.

Act III: Vahshat–Dahshat–Qayamat erupts into a feverish crescendo. Drawing on the melodramatic intensity of 1970s and 1980s cinema, it reflects on the excesses of love and loss, where disaster and ecstasy become inseparable.

Recycled art

Scattered through the space are video works by Arbab Ahmad, filmed in Okhla and projected in 4K, and multimedia installations by Goji, Kinshuk, and Shiraz Husain, produced with the Khwaab Tanha Collective and the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS). Exhibition design is by Sourav Sil.

For Rajadhyaksha, the show grew from a simple idea — to display old film posters — into a meditation on how cinema survives in fragments. “You start with the archive,” he says, “and end up in the junkyard. But that’s where you see the real life of cinema — in its repetitions, its reuses, its infinite circulation.”

Through its layers of sound, image, and recycled material, ‘Duniya Parchhaiyon Ki’ reveals cinema not as a static art form but as a living ecosystem — one that continues to flicker through our streets, songs, and collective memory. It reminds us that Hindi cinema’s most enduring power may not lie in the films themselves, but in the shadows, they leave behind.

'Duniya Parchhaiyon Ki' is on view at Arthshila, Okhla Phase II, till January 4, 2026

This article is written by Uthama Sankaranarayanan