Holiday Homework: Reimagining Childhood Through Art
Holiday Homework is a collaborative initiative between The Ardee Foundation and LOAM (The Art of Childhood), presented at Method, New Delhi. Bringing together contemporary artists and young participants, the exhibition reimagines childhood through play, creativity, and shared experiences, creating a space where imagination and artistic inquiry flourish.
As an institutional partner, The Ardee Foundation is committed to creating meaningful platforms that connect young learners with contemporary artistic practice. By enabling children to engage directly with artists and contribute their own creative voices, Holiday Homework nurtures curiosity, critical thinking, collaboration, and self-expression beyond the classroom.
With active participation from The Ardee Schools and Ardee Artists, the initiative celebrates young creativity while fostering meaningful engagement with contemporary artistic practice.
The exhibition reflects our belief that art is an essential part of holistic education, empowering young minds to observe, question, imagine, and create while fostering a lifelong appreciation for culture, creativity, and the arts.
Sacred Signs — "every line a prayer, every pattern a memory"
"Sacred Signs" brings together the profound visual languages of the Baiga and Gond communities — two of India's most revered Adivasi traditions, whose art is deeply intertwined with cosmology, memory, and the spirit of the forest. In both Baiga and Gond worldviews, the act of mark-making is not merely decorative — it is devotional. For the Baiga, sacred signs emerge through godna (ritual tattooing), geometric floor drawings, and symbolic gestures that honour ancestral knowledge and connection to the earth. Gond painting, known for its intricate lines, vibrant patterns, and living narratives, maps the relationship between human, animal, and spirit worlds through a mythic visual vocabulary.
Across these traditions, signs are sacred because they hold stories. They are not abstract motifs, but forms that channel belief, history, and place. Whether etched onto skin, painted on walls, or transformed into contemporary canvases, these symbols remain living testimonies of identity and resilience. This exhibition invites the viewer to encounter these signs not as distant tribal ornamentations, but as active, intelligent, and vital systems of seeing and being. In a world that often seeks speed and simplification, "Sacred Signs" offers an encounter with nuance, memory, and the forested depths of Indian visual heritage.
The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025–26, titled For the Time Being, brings together artists and collectives from across the world to explore memory, ancestry, storytelling, and the ways in which we carry our histories with us. With 66 artists and collectives from over 20 countries, this edition looks at how stories travel across generations, communities, places, and time.
At its heart is a reflection on embodied memory and ancestral knowledge. Some stories live in books and archives, while others live through songs, rituals, gestures, landscapes, and everyday experiences. The Biennale creates a space to listen to these stories and think about how they continue to shape the way we understand ourselves and the world around us.
For The Ardee Foundation, the Biennale is also an opportunity to bring together its long-standing engagement with art, education, and cultural dialogue. This edition sees the Foundation present the work of celebrated artist Shobha Broota at the historic Mocha Art Café in Fort Kochi, with the presentation curated by cultural theorist and curator Ina Puri. Broota's meditative abstractions and spiritual minimalism invite viewers to slow down, look closely, and find meaning in simplicity.
Through this participation, the Ardee Foundation hopes to create a space where art can be experienced not only through what we see, but through what we remember, feel, and carry with us. For the Time Being invites us to pause, listen, and reflect on the stories that connect us to one another and to the world we inherit.
At India Art Fair 2026, the Ardee Foundation presents Manjit Bawa: An Enduring Legacy, curated by Ina Puri. The exhibition brings together Bawa’s paintings from the Ardee Art Collection with music, writings, and archival material, offering a closer look at the artist and the ideas that continue to shape his legacy.
At its heart is a conversation between generations of artists. Alongside Bawa’s work are contemporary works by young artists who received the inaugural Ardee Legacy Award, responding to his visual language and philosophy through their own perspectives.
The exhibition reflects the Ardee Foundation’s belief that artistic legacy is not something to simply preserve. It is something to experience, question, and reinterpret. Through art and education, Manjit Bawa: An Enduring Legacy creates a space where one artist’s influence meets the imagination of a new generation.