On artistic agency, shared learning and the possibilities of a cultural ecosystem shaped by relationships, trust and local participation.
A Growing Community of Artists through Open exchange.
Chala Bhetuya (CBY) began in May 2025 as a platform for visiting artists in their studios across Navi Mumbai. Through these encounters, it sought to understand artistic practices in their working contexts, create opportunities for dialogue and bring artists into conversation with one another. Over time, the studio visits developed into a wider process of community-building, leading to Peripheral Shades: Beyond the Centre, Within the Community—an exhibition preceded by a three-day mentorship and critical engagement programme.
The project raises a larger question: how do artistic communities develop when access to cultural infrastructure, institutional networks and public visibility is unevenly distributed? Its response lies not only in presenting artworks, but in creating the conditions for artists to meet, exchange knowledge, reflect on their practices and participate in shaping their own cultural environment.
The Periphery as a Question of Cultural Power
The terms centre and periphery are often used to describe geographical relationships. In the arts, however, they also refer to the uneven distribution of recognition, resources, networks and opportunities. A city may be geographically close to a major cultural centre and yet remain less visible within its dominant institutional narratives.
Navi Mumbai offers a useful context in which to consider this relationship. Its artistic practices are shaped by local histories, urban transformation, migration, neighbourhoods and the everyday conditions of living and working in a developing city. Yet the visibility of these practices does not necessarily correspond to their artistic or intellectual significance.
The project’s engagement with the idea of the periphery draws on debates around cultural power and representation, including the work of Antonio Gramsci and the scholarship associated with Subaltern Studies. These frameworks invite us to examine how dominant structures determine which experiences, histories and forms of knowledge receive recognition.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay Can the Subaltern Speak? further adds complexity to the question of representation. It asks us to consider who is able to speak, whose voices are heard and how those voices are mediated by institutions and systems of knowledge.
This does not mean that artists working in Navi Mumbai can automatically be categorised as subaltern. Geography alone does not determine such a position. Rather, these ideas provide a way to examine the conditions under which artistic practices become visible, how artists represent their own experiences, and who participates in shaping the narratives through which a place is understood.
For Chala Bhetuya, the point of departure is the artist and the specificity of their practice, not an assumption that the periphery represents a single, unified experience.
The Studio Visit as a Method of Listening
The studio visit is central to Chala Bhetuya’s approach. It creates an opportunity to encounter an artist’s work in the environment in which it develops, with attention to the materials, processes, references and circumstances that inform it.
Unlike a conventional exhibition visit, a studio encounter can accommodate unfinished work, uncertainty, experimentation and questions that may not yet have reached a conclusion. The artist can discuss decisions, revisit ideas and articulate concerns that might remain outside the finished artwork.
The exchange is also reciprocal. The visiting group gains an understanding of the artist’s working context, while the host artist encounters an attentive audience and different perspectives on their practice. Explaining a body of work to others can itself become a form of reflection, helping artists recognise connections, clarify intentions or reconsider aspects of their work.
The visitors, in turn, are not simply observers. They bring their own experiences, questions and interpretations to the conversation. Each visit therefore produces a form of shared knowledge that cannot be reduced to documentation of the artwork alone.
Across the studio visits, this method has helped build familiarity among artists and participants. It has also established a basis for further engagement: a community formed through repeated encounters rather than assembled only for a single event.
From Individual Encounters to Shared Learning
The movement from studio visits to a collective platform is an important part of Chala Bhetuya’s development. Individual encounters began to reveal the value of bringing different practices and experiences into conversation.
Artists working in different media and with distinct concerns could encounter approaches beyond their immediate circles. Participants could learn about the decisions, challenges and working conditions behind a practice rather than engaging only with its finished presentation. The conversations also offered opportunities to question assumptions about artistic development, professional opportunities and the relationship between an artist and the wider art world.
For the participating studio artists, the value of such encounters lies in the possibility of being engaged with on their own terms. Their studios become places of dialogue, and their practices enter a wider exchange without being required to conform to a predetermined narrative about Navi Mumbai or its artists.
For the visitors and organising team, the process offers a more grounded understanding of the region’s artistic landscape. It reveals the diversity of practices, the circumstances in which they emerge and the relationships through which knowledge circulates.
This form of learning is cumulative. A single visit may establish an introduction; subsequent encounters allow familiarity, trust and more substantial discussion to develop. The community is built through this continuity.
Trust, Reciprocity and the Ethics of Participation
Community-building depends on more than bringing people together. It requires a shared understanding of how people participate, how their work is represented and how relationships are sustained.
Trust is particularly important when engaging with artists’ studios and ongoing practices. It involves listening without presuming to know what an artist’s work means, respecting the context in which it is made and allowing artists to articulate their own concerns. It also requires care in how their work, words and images are documented and circulated.
Reciprocity is equally important. Artists contribute their time, work and knowledge; visitors contribute attention, questions and perspectives. The organising team facilitates these encounters, but the exchange depends on the participation of everyone involved.
These values shape the project’s approach to cultural activity. Rather than treating artists as subjects to be documented or presented, Chala Bhetuya seeks to create a setting in which they can participate in an ongoing process of exchange. The aim is not to speak on behalf of a community, but to develop ways for its members to meet, learn from one another and contribute to how the community takes shape.
Mentorship: Extending the Conversation
The three-day Peripheral Shades mentorship and critical engagement programme extended this process by creating a structured space for young visual artists and final-year students from across Maharashtra to engage with practising artists associated with the Chala Bhetuya Studio Visits.
Portfolio reviews and individual conversations gave participants opportunities to discuss their work, receive critical feedback and consider questions within their practices. Sessions on portfolio development and proposal writing addressed practical aspects of artistic life, including how to document and communicate a practice and how to approach fellowships, grants, scholarships and residencies.
These concerns are closely connected. A portfolio is not merely a record of completed works; it can help an artist understand the development of their practice and communicate its concerns to different audiences. Proposal writing similarly requires artists to articulate their ideas, establish a context for their work and consider how a project might develop.
The programme also made space for peer exchange, short presentations, writing exercises and collective discussion. Participants could encounter different ways of thinking and working, while mentors could engage with emerging practices beyond their immediate professional circles.
Mentorship, in this context, was not intended to be a one-directional transfer of expertise. It created conditions for dialogue across different stages of artistic practice, with learning taking place through feedback, questioning and exchange.
From Mentorship to Public Engagement
The exhibition Peripheral Shades: Beyond the Centre, Within the Community brings this process into a public setting. Presented by Chala Bhetuya, a Faandee initiative, with D. Y. Patil School of Architecture as academic collaborator, the exhibition at Kamalnayan Bajaj Art Gallery in Mumbai marks a stage in the project’s development.
The exhibition provides a shared platform for presenting work and inviting audiences into conversations around artistic practice and the cultural landscape of Navi Mumbai. It also extends the mentorship programme, with participating artists developing works in response to a proposed exhibition theme.
Yet the exhibition is one part of a longer process. Its significance rests not only in the artworks displayed or the visibility they receive, but also in the relationships and exchanges that precede it. The studio visits establish contact; mentorship creates opportunities for critical engagement; the exhibition brings these encounters into public view.
Each stage serves a different purpose, while contributing to a broader effort to strengthen the conditions for artistic dialogue and participation.
Building a Cultural Ecosystem Through Relationships
A cultural ecosystem does not emerge through exhibitions alone. It develops through the relationships between artists, audiences, educational institutions, organisers and spaces of artistic production. It also depends on the less visible work of coordination, documentation, communication and sustained engagement.
For Chala Bhetuya, community-building is therefore an ongoing practice rather than a completed outcome. Its possibilities lie in maintaining connections, encouraging further encounters and making room for different forms of participation as the project evolves.
This approach also acknowledges the importance of local sensibilities—sthanik samvedna—in understanding artistic practice. Locality is not simply a geographical marker. It carries histories, experiences, languages, relationships and ways of seeing that can shape how artists work and how their practices are understood.
To build a cultural platform around these conditions requires attention to the particular rather than a single account of the region. It means recognising differences between artists, allowing multiple perspectives to coexist and avoiding the assumption that one initiative can represent an entire community.
Beyond Representation, Towards Participation
Chala Bhetuya’s journey from studio visits to mentorship and exhibition offers a way to think about cultural visibility as a process of participation. The question is not only how artists from outside dominant cultural networks can be seen, but how they can take part in shaping the spaces, conversations and relationships through which art is made public.
The project does not claim to resolve the structural inequalities that affect cultural production. Its contribution is more situated: to create opportunities for artists to meet on their own terms, exchange knowledge, develop critical relationships and build connections that may continue beyond a programme or exhibition.
In this sense, the work of Chala Bhetuya extends beyond presenting art from a particular geography. It is an effort to build a community through trust, reciprocity, listening and shared responsibility; a community in which artists are not only represented, but are active participants in shaping their cultural environment.
Peripheral Shades marks one point in this continuing process. What follows depends on the relationships it sustains, the conversations it enables and the possibilities that participants choose to develop together.
Participating Artists
Ciby Samuel, Hansodnya Tambe, Hema Mhatre, Narendra Thakare, Nikhil Purohit, Pankaj Khalode, Pravin Dhanuskar, Raj Bharti, Rasana Bhardwaj, Sandip More, Satendra Mhatre, Uttam Ghosh, Vilas Bhad and Vikrant Shitole.
Chala Bhetuya — Core Team
An artist-led initiative coordinated by Vilas Bhad, Uttam Ghosh, Sandip More, Raj Bharti, Pravin Dhanuskar, Pankaj Khalode, Nikhil Purohit and Narendra Thakare.
