This art exhibition in Delhi evokes nostalgia around the houses we once lived in

Do you remember the old windows, the doors, the huge ceiling fans rotating slowly over your head, the saplings sprouting out of the broken bricks on the wall, the slippery moss-covered path leading to your house, where you lived once? This exhibition, called Houses I Almost Lived In, stirs such memories that refuse to fade with the passage of time. 

Currently on at Latitude 28 in Delhi's Defence Colony, the exhibition brings together the works of Shalina Vichitra, Pooja Iranna, Raj Jariwala, Samit Das, and Mahen Perera, examining how form, touch, and repetition shape our sense of belonging.  From layered cartographies and cement grids to stitched residual forms, these artists illuminate how architecture grows into the grain of memory, surviving long after physical structures have vanished.

Raj Jariwala reorders maps and numerical systems into accumulations that question the distance between measured space and lived reality. His artworks and structures reveal how every act of ordering space carries emotional and political weight that settles, unbidden, into the mind.

Samit Das excavates the architecture of silence itself, drawing from personal and historical archives to let material fragments speak of time’s quiet persistence. His works remind us that cities and buildings hold cultural and ecological memory long after their physical forms have changed or vanished.

Mahen Perera extends painting into stitched, knotted, residual forms that carry the bodily trace of place. Through stretch, tear, and material leftover, his artworks become intimate records of how architecture leaves its mark on flesh and feeling alike.

Pooja Iranna works directly with the raw matter of cities, cement, pins, mirrors, lattices, building and dismantling grids that mirror the relentless cycle of urban construction and loss. Her sculptures expose how architecture, in its material frenzy, imprints on collective memory even as it erases older traces.

Shalina Vichitra treats cartography as a personal archaeology of belonging. Her layered sculptures and imagined map paintings chronicle the fragile, ongoing production of place, where landscape and shelter merge into sensorial archives of what it means to remember or long for a home.

These works not only evoke nostalgia, but also strengthen our memories of all the spaces we inhabited in the past, asking us to pause in time, reflect and remember our roots.

Exhibition on till May 25, at LATITUDE 28, Defence Colony, New Delhi

Timings: Monday to Sunday | 11 am to 7 pm