The Art That Doesn’t Stay Still
At NMACC, art is not confined to frames or walls. From Subodh Gupta’s everyday objects and Vibha Galhotra’s ghungroo-filled cityscape to immersive works from Tokyo’s Team Labs that respond to touch, movement and presence, the experience invites visitors to look a little closer, ask questions and discover art without feeling like they need to know all the answers.
There is a moment on a visit to the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), when you realise you have stopped walking. It happens in front of an artwork made with ghungroos.
At first glance, it looks like a shimmering image of Mumbai. Look again and the familiar city begins to emerge: Marine Drive, the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, the Gateway of India, the Taj, the cultural centre and even the tracks of a local train. Come closer and the picture becomes something else altogether. Thousands of ghungroos, each heated to achieve its colour and individually stitched onto a canvas, have been brought together to create Vibha Galhotra’s City Obscure.
Someone in the group guesses that the work is made of beads. Someone else says grains. Then comes the answer: ghungroos.
That small exchange is perhaps what makes a place like this interesting. Art here does not always begin with knowing. Sometimes it begins with guessing.
The cultural centre in Mumbai’s BKC is built on a scale that can easily overwhelm. There is the Grand Theatre, with a capacity of more than 2,000, its 35-metre stage and its sweeping auditorium designed by the same firm associated with the Sydney Opera House. There are smaller theatres designed for workshops, music, dance and performances by emerging artists. But somewhere between these imposing spaces, the art keeps pulling you back to smaller details.
A pillar inspired from Delos gate in Mykonos, Greece by Subodh Gupta, for instance, is made from broken ceramic pieces and everyday kitchen objects. Gupta is known for turning ordinary things into the material of his work, and here the familiar becomes unfamiliar. The objects are recognisable, but their purpose has changed. They are no longer things from a kitchen. They have become something to stop and look at.
That shift in perspective runs through much of the cultural centre.
In the foyer, art is encountered almost casually, while elsewhere performances and workshops bring artists and audiences together. The smaller Studio and Cube theatres are used for dance, music, sound healing and workshops, with artists invited to perform from Thursday through Sunday. The intention is not only to present established work, but to give newer artists a space to be seen and experienced.
Then there is the Art House.
The current exhibition, Second Nature, turns the relationship between nature and technology into something visitors can physically experience. The works are immersive, and on some floors, touching them is not only permitted but necessary.
Across nine immersive installations, artists and studios including Random International, teamLab, A.A. Murakami, Simon Heijdens and Es Devlin explore the shifting relationship between nature, technology and human experience.
One room becomes a digital garden filled with projected flowers that respond when touched. Another installation, Nirvana, reacts to contact with its walls. Elsewhere, balloon-like forms called ovoids light up and produce sounds when touched, creating what feels like a collection of tiny, responsive worlds.
Es Devlin’s screenshare encourages visitors to tear a page of the screen as keepsake at the end of the performance of dancer Dam Van Huynh.
There is something disarming about being told that you can touch the art.
For a generation accustomed to museums where the safest distance from an artwork is several feet away, the instinct is initially to hold back. Then someone reaches out. A flower moves. A wall responds. A light changes. Suddenly, the work is no longer something being explained to you. You have become part of it.
Another installation turns the visitor into a temporary portrait. Cameras capture people in front of it, their images appear on screen and then disappear. The idea is simple enough to understand without a long explanation: life keeps moving, images come and go, and what exists in one moment may not remain in the next.
Other works are less playful. Some ask visitors to think about surveillance and the extent to which technology has become embedded in ordinary life. Cameras and sensors are no longer things we consciously notice. They have become part of the background of everyday existence.
That is where the art becomes relatable.
You don’t have to arrive knowing the vocabulary of contemporary art. You can ask what something is made of. You can mistake ghungroos for beads. You can wonder why a camera is watching you. You can touch a digital flower and see what happens.
The guided experience matters too. Staff explain the works, but the explanations do not have to be the end of the conversation. They give visitors a way into the work, particularly those who may not regularly walk into galleries or feel comfortable deciding what a contemporary artwork means.
And perhaps that is the more valuable role of a cultural centre. Not simply to bring world-class infrastructure and international art experiences to an Indian audience, but to make people curious enough to stop in front of something they do not immediately understand.
In the end, the most memorable part of the visit may not be the size of the theatre or the scale of the building. It may be the moment someone looks at an artwork, points at it and asks, “What is that made of?”
And waits for the answer.
The ‘Second Nature’ at NMACC will run till January 10, 2027 at the Art House.