KYNKYNY’s Mumbai debut considers how women artists are reshaping conversations around memory and mythology

For years, exhibitions centred on women’s interiority have often been flattened into familiar categories: intimacy, vulnerability, autobiography. The language surrounding such shows tends to drift towards the sentimental, treating feminine experience as something instinctive rather than rigorously constructed. Yet a growing number of younger galleries and curators have begun approaching these practices differently, placing emotional and ecological inquiry at the centre of contemporary art discourse rather than at its edges.

KYNKYNY debuts in Mumbai at 47 A in Khotachiwadi

Cartographies of the Inner World, opening on May 15 at 47 A in Khotachiwadi, arrives within that shift. Organised by the Bengaluru-based gallery KYNKYNY, the exhibition brings together seven artists whose works move across painting, sculpture, printmaking, embroidery and mixed media. The participating artists, Dimpy Menon, Rakhee Shenoy, Veenita Chendvankar, Payal Rokade, Bakula Nayak, Priyanka Aelay and Nidhi Mariam Jacob, share little in terms of formal language. What connects them instead is a sustained attention to memory, inherited narratives and humanity’s increasingly fragile relationship with the natural world.

“The curation for this exhibition came together in a very natural and organic manner,” said Vivek Radhakrishnan, Director and Co Founder of KYNKYNY Art Gallery. “This was never intended to be a show of women artists alone, but there is no doubt that the energy guiding my selection process was a feminine one.”

That idea of “energy” becomes the exhibition’s underlying structure. Rather than arranging works around a rigid curatorial thesis, the show allows affinities to emerge gradually between objects and images. In the surrealist compositions of Rakhee Shenoy, Veenita Chendvankar and Payal Rokade, myth and memory collapse into one another. Figures drift through dreamlike landscapes that feel suspended outside conventional chronology, drawing equally from folklore, personal recollection and speculative fiction.

Elsewhere, the exhibition turns towards forms of preservation and material history. Dimpy Menon’s bronze sculptures possess a tactile fluidity, while Bakula Nayak incorporates vintage documents into her mixed media works, transforming archival fragments into meditations on personal memory and disappearance.

The strongest conversations, however, unfold through the exhibition’s engagement with ecology. In works by Nidhi Mariam Jacob and Priyanka Aelay, dense botanical imagery becomes a way of thinking through coexistence, care and environmental precarity. Nature appears neither romanticised nor symbolic. It exists as a living system that continues to shape emotional and psychic life.

“The title stems from the fact that each artist’s practice undeniably draws us into their inner world,” Radhakrishnan said. “What one encounters in this exhibition are renditions of past and present experiences, fabricated fantasy worlds, translations of ancient fairy tales, as well as personal reflections on the relationship between our species and the planet.”

In Mumbai’s increasingly accelerated cultural landscape, Cartographies of the Inner World offers something more measured. It asks viewers to remain with ambiguity, to move slowly through emotional terrain, and to consider introspection as a serious artistic language rather than a decorative one.

What: Cartographies of the Inner World

When: 15th May 2026 onwards

Where: 47 A in Khotachiwadi

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