Metal with memory.

Mumbai-based designer and artist Ashiesh Shah makes his UK solo debut with Taamr, a new body of work at Carpenters Workshop Gallery anchored by copper as both material and idea. The title takes its name from the Sanskrit word for copper, a metal that changes with touch and time.

Shah’s practice has long placed Indian craft in conversation with contemporary design. Working with karigars (artisans) from across India, he draws on traditions ranging from longpi pottery to dhokra metalwork, treating craft not as heritage under glass but as a living, inventive practice.

In Brahmand Cabinet, antique copper pots rest on a black granite base, giving domestic vessels a renewed sculptural presence. Mirror Mosaic Coffee Table meanwhile looks to the precision of Jadau and Kundan jewellery, while Dveep Coffee Table recalls Mumbai’s origin as an archipelago, its reflective surfaces linked by strands of hand-turned Channapatna beads. Matka Mobile reimagines earthen pots as a gently orbiting arrangement, with sun, moon and earth suspended overhead.

Across the exhibition, copper is a way to think about transformation. In Shah’s hands, the material is a living archive: familiar yet always evolving.

Common ground.

This summer, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art travels from New Delhi to King Street with The Meeting Ground: Scenes from the KNMA Collection, a major institutional exhibition staged with Christie’s as part of its summer exhibition series. Free to visit, it offers London audiences a rare glimpse into one of South Asia’s most important museum collections, at a moment when KNMA is preparing for its vast new standalone home in New Delhi.

Curated by Akansha Rastogi with Preeti Bahadur, Avijna Bhattacharya, Premjish Achari and Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, the exhibition brings together modern and contemporary works alongside folk and indigenous practices from South Asia in a set of scenes in which artists, materials and ways of thinking are set in conversation with one another.

The exhibition develops through a set of interlinked strands rather than a single linear narrative. It begins with a dialogue between modernists including M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza, Jeram Patel, K.C.S. Paniker, K.G. Subramanyan and K. Ramanujam, mapping exchanges between different centres of artistic production in India from the mid-twentieth century to the present, before expanding into a more performative register where artists such as Neha Choksi, LN Tallur and Simryn Gill explore how acts of listening and mark-making keep memory alive. A further strand foregrounds figures including Zainul Abedin, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Zarina Hashmi, F.N. Souza and Bani Abidi, whose practices resist the rigid borders imposed by modern cartographies.

Running through these movements are artists rooted in indigenous traditions, among them Jangarh Singh Shyam and Jivya Soma Mashe, alongside the collaborative work of Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad. Together, these threads build a layered account of desire, belonging and displacement, and invite viewers to reconsider how a collection might be experienced. Essential viewing.