Memory Palace: Curated with Ayaz Basrai

Memory Palace, curated with architect and spatial researcher Ayaz Basrai, opens Muziris Contemporary with works by Harsimran C Juneja, Nandita Mukand, Kuber Shah, N. N. Rimzon, Santhi E. N., Tulika Shrivastava, Kapil Jangid, and the Vayeda Brothers. Through varied media and material vocabularies, the artists consider how memory inhabits the built environment, and how architecture can become a scaffold for both personal and collective histories.

They explore how spaces hold memory and how memory, in turn, reshapes our sense of space. Some gestures are rooted in the personal: a home once inhabited, a village from purple hued memories of childhood, an interior that shaped the self. Others draw on the shared architectures of civic life: structures that stand, or have vanished, yet remain etched in a city’s cultural consciousness. Moving between sites that endure and those reconstructed in the mind’s eye, the works become acts of preservation and re-imagination. They refuse the fixity of an archive; operating instead as subjective cartographies, mapping the psychic and spatial residues of place. Within the gallery, these geographies overlap and accumulate, constructing a “memory palace” that is at once fragmentary and whole, a spatial mnemonic built through individual acts of return.

As the gallery’s first exhibition in its Colaba home, the show also folds Arsiwala Mansion into its scope. Its walls, proportions, and residues of earlier lives become yet another layer in this palimpsest of memory and place, positioning the gallery and its own architecture as an active participant in the exhibition.

Ayaz Basrai, whose own practice examines the intersections of space, neurology, and memory, brings a distinct curatorial layer to the exhibition. His contribution threads through the space as an invitation to inhabit it like a memory palace, an architecture for remembering, and draws a parallel to Ancient Rome, where the House of the Tragic Poet stood as a testament to the symbiotic relationship between art, artist, space, and patron. Rome, for centuries, was connected by trade to the ancient port of Muziris; this distant exchange lingers here as a faint but persistent echo in the weaving together of histories, architectures, and acts of looking back. A small book, conceived by Ayaz, accompanies the exhibition, a portable companion to the show, to be carried through the gallery as you move and construct your own memory palace.