October 1–November 7, 2025
In the context of intense debates in South Asia about the respective values (financial and cultural) of contemporary art and traditional craft, the inaugural Jodhpur Arts Week made clear that the two forms are not mutually exclusive, if they must be distinguished from each other at all. “Hath Ro Hunar”, the week’s theme, means “skill of the hand” in Marwari, a language local to Rajasthan. The show—curated by Tapiwa Matsinde and Sakhshi Mahajan, with Aprajita Sharma, and supported by the Public Arts Trust of India—featured several promising collaborations between local artisans and contemporary artists.
Ayesha Singh’s site-specific installation Subterranean Inversion: Structures of Forgetting (all works 2025), co-authored with metal artisans Mayank and Kuldeep Kularia, at Mayla Bagh Ka Jhalra—a stepwell that was commissioned for the royal concubine Gulab Rai in 1780—engaged with India’s precolonial architecture from a feminist perspective. Stepwells hold deep significance in the subcontinent, not only as utilitarian structures for water collection and bathing rituals, but also as rare public sites where women could gather, spend time together, and engage in prayer. The work overlaid the existing steps with thirteen metal arches, representing structures Singh had studied in the course of her architectural and historical research about stepwells in India. From some angles, they seemed to disappear against the gray steps, emulating cascades of water or the flow of a saree.
Bangalore-based artist Kaimurai, aka Abishek Ganesh Jayashree, worked with local stone carver Kishore Sankhla to create Through me runs the ancient water. Some stepwells in India are becoming environmental hazards due to non-maintenance; Kaimurai reflected on this by experimenting with natural indigo dye on stone, here representing resilience and ancestry. Below a large indigo-dyed fabric panel hanging from the ceiling, Kaimurai placed a stone on a mini stepwell. With each step, the blue pigment of the indigo dye waned, hinting at the holiness of the water being affected by man-made environmental destruction. Karnatic music by Kaimurai accompanied the installation, recalling the rhythms of water as it flows, breaks, and splashes.
Shree Sumer School was also home to Saruha Kilaru’s sculptural series Fragile Resilience, which took up the theme of how stepwells and waterways hold both strength and frailty; even though their utility has decreased due to ongoing pollution, the structures and stories remain. Kilaru’s glass water pot–like structures held native plant species from a national park in Jodhpur, reminiscent of terrariums that protect yet restrict the natural growth of plant species. They also mimic the role many women in traditional South Asian societies are expected to play: fragile, delicate, pure, and groomed into silence and domestication.
At the same venue as Fragile Resilience was the strongest response to the curatorial framework: a project by LAND (Learning Through Arts, Narrative and Discourse) Creative Arts Education Programme led by Kriti Sood, active across five government schools in Jodhpur’s Walled City. Young adult students recorded the city through its soil elements, memory maps, and interviews with inhabitants of the Walled City, presented here in the form of a wooden chest inspired by Rajasthani miniature painting. The detailed stories embedded in each object in the chest were the results of an in-depth sociopolitical enquiry into the place’s disappearing traditions, livelihoods, and micro-cultural elements as the Walled City, once a residential area, becomes a tourist attraction.
The main venue (Shree Sumer School), the stepwells, and other spaces in the Walled City allowed local audiences to experience these works in the public spaces of their daily life. At times, however, there was a disconnect between the sites and the artworks’ thematics. The display of a work by Richa Arya and Sindhi embroiderers of the Sang Welfare Society—a textile work with metal and embroidered elements titled Bound by Threads, United by Hands that served as a living archive of women’s labor and care—in the lobby of the luxury hotel Daspan House felt more like decoration than intellectual provocation. During the week, Jodhpur was suffused with the atmosphere of Dussehra, with citizens making large structures of the evil King Ravana to later set fire to and celebrate the victory of good over evil, as per the Ramayana. Such everyday, local “skills of the hand” were strangely excluded from the arts week, which at times felt like an elaborate branding exercise for the city directed towards an elite, English-speaking faction of society. These traditions of the city themselves, as the Dussehra celebrations and the Walled City oral history project show, also deserve to be showcased and celebrated.
