Thukral & Tagra closed out Chennai’s summer with Mimesis, a show that translated hundreds of painted canvases into a study of data, memory and the pixelated textures of digital life. Presented at Ashvita’s newly launched white cube space in Ozone Premia, Mylapore, the Mimesis exhibition ran through July 17, marking the gallery’s first outing since it opened its doors to the city’s art crowd.
What Thukral & Tagra Explored Through Mimesis
The show grew out of Arboretum, the duo’s long-running project built around trees, memory and living archives. Where that series stayed rooted in organic ecosystems, Mimesis moved into digital terrain, translating lived moments into pixels, bars and fragmented visual units. Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra described it as an attempt to imagine infinite units, each representing a lived moment, where time, data and urgency became ways of seeing that shaped the entire body of work.
Sumir Tagra traced the idea back to something almost everyone recognises – waking up between two lights, the yellow light of the sun and the white light of the phone screen, constantly moving between online and offline worlds. For Thukral & Tagra, that observation fed into Coded Gaze, a five-year conceptual diary the artists kept, examining how technology has folded itself into daily life until the line between a person and their mediated version grows hard to trace.
Inside the Ashvita’s Gallery Show
The paintings leaned on geometric forms that echoed enlarged pixels and interface icons, including the power button. Feral Shadows, the acrylic on canvas piece that opened the show asked how much anyone actually trusts the data they generate, or pauses to look at the searches and preferences that quietly define them. Mutation 2 pushed further, pointing at the millions of data-driven projects drawing on private lives with almost no consent involved in the exchange.
This was not the first outing for the Mimesis exhibition. Since the project began in 2022, parts of it had already travelled through Nature Morte in New Delhi, the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Jaipur Centre for Art and Kamalnayan Bajaj Art Gallery in Mumbai, before this expansive edition brought Thukral & Tagra‘s work into Ashvita’s newest space. Gallery director Ashvin E Rajagopalan described the intent behind the venue itself, built as a hybrid between a gallery and a home, as a place where art could genuinely live and not just hang on a wall.
Alongside the paintings, Ashvita’s put out a studio signature newsletter carrying an essay by Chirag Thakkar to accompany the show. Even as it engaged closely with digital art and its underlying anxieties, Mimesis stayed rooted in painting instead of screen-based digital art, leaning into slowness, a quality Sumir called the counterweight to technology’s pace.
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