Cosmos and spice route on your plate!

Kumari Nahappan’s solo exhibition at Delhi’s Gallery Pristine channels a cosmic chromatic resonance through seeds and spices to monumental forms

24 Sep 2025

Namrata Dewanjee

It’s only a matter of a month before dining rooms across Southeast Asia are decked in colours, even more than usual. Turmeric-tinged pulao, red chilli tadka and saffron-hued kheer, behind the vibrance of each richly-hued festive tablescape, is a thrilling narrative of the spice route, from pepper’s status as the black gold that changed the fate of the Malabar to nutmeg, clove and cinnamon that made a trading hub out of a sparsely populated fishing village, Singapore. The same city-state where artist Kumari Nahappan lives and works at the interstice of cultural memory, ritual form and cosmic speculation.

Her first solo exhibition in India, called Chromatic Currents, at Gallery Pristine in Delhi, extends this matrix. Drawing upon the ancient maritime spice routes, Kumari traces how culture migrates alongside myths, iconographies and devotional practices. What appears as pigment in food or ritual acquires, in her practice, a metaphysical dimension: colour as resonance, vibration, frequency. An energy that mediates between the quotidian and the cosmic.

“With Chromatic Currents, Indian audiences will experience Kumari's practice within a cultural and historical framework that connects our shared past with the present moment”

Arjun Sawhney and Arjun Butani of Gallery Pristine

PIGMENT AND WAVELENGTH

For Kumari, colour is not simply material but a field of energy. Curator John Tung, who also practises in Singapore, positions it as a liminal bridge between the sacred and the everyday, a medium that channels forces beyond language. Hindu cosmology undergirds much of this thinking: celestial bodies dictate the hues of the Navagraha, while chromatic frequencies map the rhythms of the universe. Yet Kumari resists taxonomies. Her palette oscillates between cultural specificity and universal affect, unsettling any attempt at a fixed symbolic order. The work instead invites a phenomenological encounter with colour as memory, as ritual gesture, as a metaphysical pulse.

COSMIC EXPLOSION

“Kumari’s practice is one of transformation. From the granularity of seeds and spices to monumental sculptural gestures, her works hold together the intimate and the universal. With Chromatic Currents, Indian audiences encounter her art within a cultural and historical constellation that binds shared pasts to the immediacy of the present,” observe Arjun Sawhney and Arjun Butani, co-founders of Gallery Pristine Contemporary.

The exhibition unfolds her lexicon of forms across the cosmic and the ritual. In Pooja, a chamber rendered in black and white honours Chandra (Moon) and Shani (Saturn), enacting polarity and reconciliation through chromatic austerity. Cosmic Conches extend outward in spirals that echo the very structure of the universe, while Monument, first realised in 1996 and here reinterpreted, reimagines turmeric, mirror and fabric as a contemplative sanctuary within the urban landscape. At the threshold, Dance of Surya and Auld Lang Syne, separated by two decades, converge to evoke cycles of time, remembrance and renewal.

Through canvases and sculptural installations, she reworks the sensorial matter of spices within an expanded cosmological imagination. A reflection on how memory, ritual and cosmic temporality inscribe into colour itself: an assertion that what nourishes the body is inseparable from the rhythms of the cosmos.