APRE Art House at India Art Fair 2026

At India Art Fair 2026, APRE Art House is showing work by seven artists who've built their practices through serious, long-term research. The booth brings together Pragati Dalvi Jain, Sarban Chowdhury, UBIK, Sooraja K. S., Meher Afroz Vaid, Aakriti Chandervanshi, and Radha Rathi. Photography, ceramics, painting, performance, conceptual publishing, it's a real mix. But what connects them is APRE's focus on artists who ground their work in lived experience and actual social contexts.

Research, embodiment and material thinking across seven practices

You won't find one big curatorial theme stamped across everything. Memory comes up. So does embodiment, material process, questions about visibility. These ideas weave through the booth but they're not forced into some unified concept. Director and curator Prerna S. M. Jain calls it "a tightly held curatorial proposition that foregrounds research-led practices engaging with questions of embodiment, memory, materiality, and visibility within contemporary South Asian contexts." Basically, she's creating space for proximity and friction, letting each practice hold its ground.

Aakriti Chandervanshi digs into architecture, photography, personal archives. A lot of her work goes back to homes and family memory, specifically centering women who've been sidelined in official histories. For her, the domestic isn't just background, it's built through emotional inheritance, where private stories crash into bigger questions about gender and who controls the narrative.

Then there's Radha Rathi, whose paintings shift gears entirely. She's working between sharp detail and abstraction, constructing these psychologically charged spaces that don't resolve neatly. Colour, light, texture — she uses them to evoke memory-states and imagination, not to show you a literal place. Put her next to Chandervanshi and you get two totally different approaches to interiority. One's archival, the other's sensory.

Sarban Chowdhury's ceramics are all about material transformation. He's done doctoral research on sustainability and circular economies, and he's figured out how to turn industrial waste into ceramic glazes. The work that comes out of that? It holds this weird tension, fragile but enduring. You're looking at extraction, contamination, repair. It's grounded in material research, sure, but it also reads socially. Vulnerability, constraint, it's all there in the form.

APRE doesn't focus much on medium-based categories. "The diversity of mediums within the booth is intentional and generative," Jain says. What matters is how artists think, not what box their work fits into. That mindset opens up connections you wouldn't expect, especially when you bring UBIK into the mix.

UBIK operates across text, image, objects, publishing. Always interrogating how meaning gets made, how it circulates. Their work introduces friction: makes you question authorship, value, how you're supposed to interpret what you're seeing. It's precise, restrained. Against the more materially heavy pieces, it works like a counterpoint. Not trying to solve anything, just complicating things in useful ways.

Gendered experience, embodiment, these keep surfacing. Sooraja K. S. pulls from personal stories and everyday materials to examine how female bodies get shaped by labour, by being watched, by social regulation. Domestic imagery shows up again and again. She's questioning inherited ideas of femininity without pretending there are easy answers.

Pragati Dalvi Jain goes deep into maternal identity, care, psychosomatic experience. Stuff that often gets shoved aside or made invisible. She puts personal vulnerability into conversation with broader socio-political structures. Her research background includes a fellowship at Harvard, and you can feel that rigor. The body, in her work, is something constructed by care, by isolation, by what society expects.

Jain's curatorial framing makes this emphasis deliberate. She says, "across the practices presented, the body emerges not only as subject but as a site of knowledge"—shaped by gendered labour, displacement, environmental pressures. The artists approach this through making, through lived experience. Not through statements or theory.

Meher Afroz Vaid's intermedia practice stretches the conversation toward land, migration, sensory perception. She's working across installation, image, text, tracking transitions shaped by geography and movement. What she adds is a spatial, environmental angle, connecting bodily experience to shifting landscapes in ways the other work doesn't quite touch.

APRE sees this booth as "a distilled extension" of what they do year-round. Conceptual clarity matters. So does spatial pacing, how you frame things for viewers. Even in a fair setting—compressed, noisy—they're prioritising sustained engagement over quick hits. You can enter the work from multiple angles. Nothing's been dumbed down.

What APRE Art House is presenting at India Art Fair 2026 comes down to research, proximity, critical attention. The works are placed carefully, in conversation with each other. They need time. Spend it, and what you get is a window into a gallery that backs practices built through inquiry, practices that stay tuned to the social conditions they come out of.

February 5-8, 2026, At India Art Fair, APRE Art House, Booth K07

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