Five artists, one shared question: how much of what we see is perception, and how much is memory, expectation, or habit doing the work for us. Living In Interesting Times doesn't try to settle that question so much as keep it open, piece after piece, until the not-knowing starts to feel deliberate.

Not every piece earns that question equally, and here's a closer look at each.

Alagar Raja Ponniah: Layer Over Layer Until Infinite Self

A smart placement of The Point of Becoming just past the entrance. A gush of colour and pattern where the five elements spiral inward through tadpole-like forms toward a Shatkona star. As a single image, it reads as the bridge between scientific facts and supernatural beliefs. It has a distinctiveness that the rest of the room has to compete with.

The trouble is that it's not a single image. The work comes in two versions, placed apart, and the second never quite recovers from standing next to the first. Where the opening panel earns its symbolism through sheer visual force, the companion piece reads as decorative — a philosophical footnote that the first half has already said more loudly and more convincingly.

The Infinite Self, Ponniah's concave mirror-like stainless steel set in a still sea of blue sheet under black epoxy coral-like detailing, is an interesting idea. The inversion doing double duty as reflection and provocation. But it's hung in the wake of The Point of Becoming's noise, and a quiet, contemplative object like this one needed quieter neighbours to land.

Venkatesh Balasubramaniyam and Ganesh Selvaraj: Perception, tested honestly

What You See Is What You See? takes Stella's line and turns it into a real question — Venkatesh Balasubramaniyam cuts finished paintings into strips and reassembles them into new images, so each canvas is secretly a fragment of another. Read the artist's note before you look, and the piece stops feeling repetitive; the repetition is the argument. What's easy to miss, and worth crediting the curator for, is a decision that could have gone the other way: the fragments are never hung side by side. If they were, the transformation would be obvious at a glance, and the whole question the title poses would answer itself before you'd had a chance to ask it. Keeping them apart is what keeps the piece alive.

Selvaraj's Doing the Same and Expecting Different Results — stripped magazine pages pasted row after row into a grayscale gradient — has no business working as well as it does. It's the same mechanical action repeated, and yet every row is its own thing: different faces, different colour, different fragments of text. Given Selvaraj's stated position that abstraction is essentially anything left to chance, there's no way he could have known in advance that this particular repetition would generate this much variation. The experiment proving out the thought process is where the magic is.

The two works titled Approach Without Preoccupied Knowledge extend the same instinct across eight years. The 2026 piece sets a square within a square, two horseshoe-magnet curves pushing against each other, with the colour and the kite-paper detailing in the inner circle standing in for the resistance between what we see and what we've already decided to perceive. The 2018 piece baits the eye outright — from a distance it reads as a snake slithering between two boards, playing on Selvaraj's own question of why we see figures in clouds, until a closer look reveals it was never a snake at all, just a sliver of shattered paper. One argues the point through structure, the other through a trick played directly on the viewer — and both land because they trust you to do the interpretive work rather than doing it for you.

Contruction by Ganesh Selvaraj, which I read as Construction, as it seems too deliberate a bridge to be a slip — a map marked "joint" on one side, a film reel on the other, with nail-shadows underneath both forming a kind of buried bridge between them. The missing letter, if it's a choice at all, fits a piece already built on things half-there and half-implied.

Narayan V: Unilateral complementary nature of Identity

Totally — circles cut to fit inside grids to make squares. The formal contrast between circle and square is clean, but it stays at the level of a design exercise.

Losing / Gaining Identity is one of the strongest works in the show. Two entirely different objects — a monochrome King and Queen of Hearts, and a chunk of wood nailed at the sides and burnt from one edge — say the exact same thing through completely different means. Losing an identity and gaining one are happening at once, and the piece never has to explain that; the burnt wood and the inverted card make the same argument in two unrelated materials, which is what makes it land as complementary rather than just clever.

Prabakaran Swaminathan: The Quieter Self-Portrait of the show

Madras Abstraction moves from Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup to a 2026 study of two opposing dining experiences in Chennai — on one side, a disposable placemat lies under a white plate, finely folded serviette, fork and spoon, each placed with exact care; on the other, a plastic sheet lies over the plate itself, plastic covering plastic. The irony sits plainly in the lifestyle spectrum of a vast city.

And the spatial silhouette sculpture, along with Madras Abstraction, is, to me, the closest thing this show has to a self-portrait — not through likeness, but through what I'd call Prabakaran Swaminathan's lust for life. The sculpture doesn't pull off the astral projection it's clearly reaching for; I didn't feel transported. But I did come away understanding how much reflection matters to him as a working method, and that felt entirely in step with the show's title. Living In Interesting Times isn't really about the times being interesting — it's about the discipline of stopping to notice that they are.

Poem, and the adjacent series contrasting monochrome doodle against coloured lines on a DNA strand and a walking figure, are simple and land anyway. There's no ambiguity to untangle here, and that's the strength: a handwritten note and plainly drawn structures manage to say plenty.

Nothing Is Everything extends the same logic outward — a flower in bloom and the world around it, sharing one palette to argue that nothing exists independent of anything else. It's a quieter continuation of Prabakaran Swaminathan's own thread, but it earns its place at the close of his cluster.

Where it lands

What makes this show work is that it swamps a person with an intriguing question — it tests perception, but also gives space and means to reflect and analyse. It does not try to resolve the tension it sets up between what you see and what you're primed to see. The curatorial hand is mostly careful about that — What You See Is What You See? is the clearest proof of it — even when it occasionally works against an individually splendid piece, as with The Infinite Self. Selvaraj's cluster is the show's real centre of gravity: work that trusts chance and repetition to generate meaning nobody fully saw coming. That's a harder thing to pull off than a single striking image, and this show has both.