Rupali Gupte, Prasad Shetty, 2023, shown at Kiran Nadar Musuem of Art, Delhi, at the exhibition. ‘Very Small Feelings’ curated by the Akansha Rastogi and Diana Campbell

Belly of the Strange at KNMA assumes the form of a giant toy or a critter. The scale is meant to confuse. One doesn’t know if it is a large overgrown toy or a diminutive space nestled within the gallery or a  large faraway galaxy. Its whale like interior with a warm glow invites you to tell and listen to strange and fabulous stories from multiple geographies that children have grown up with. These are stories that children don’t find strange because they have not yet been socialised into a world of rationality. In doing so the space draws on the diverse logics of inhabitations in the world that have otherwise been reduced through ideas of standards, property, privacy and permanence into the conventional forms of inhabiting that we practice today.  It is also a call for us to completely recalibrate our own coordinates of thinking of space. Here art and architecture intersects to enable this provocation. The space of the Belly deforms to create multiple possibilities of inhabitation. As one dances, slides, sleeps, sits, huddles with others, it asks us to rethink how one has been conditioned into the imagination and practice of space. To enlarge this imagination is the set of books in the belly from various geographies that open new epistemic fissures to experience the world through.