Party Is Elsewhere: When Art, Absence and Space Collide

The party began with a thud.

Not music, or chatter, but the relentless banging of hammers striking down on a long wooden table lined with wine glasses. The glasses trembled but did not shatter. Above them, a neon sign glowed with quiet insistence. Around them, tiles were stained, plaster peeling, and a decades-old ceiling sagged visibly.

This was Party Is Elsewhere, anchored by a kinetic installation by a renowned Mumbai-based Indian contemporary artist Sudarshan Shetty, but staged inside an abandoned night bar where nothing had been cleaned up for comfort.

The building was not a backdrop. It was a co-conspirator. 

A Work With a Past

The exhibition did more than simply display Shetty’s 2005 installation, which was first staged in a fire-damaged Mumbai gallery awaiting demolition. It also borrowed the title of that work, using it to frame the larger ideas and tensions explored in the show.

Conceived for an anniversary celebration in a gallery housed in a building that had recently been gutted by fire, the installation was structurally and sensorially stark. 

Through this combination of repetitive mechanical motion, fragile glass and symbolic text, Shetty not only engaged with the fragility of meaning but insisted on the idea that the party like fulfilment, presence or belonging, was always projected into another time, place or state of mind rather than found in the immediate space. The work functioned as both, a site-specific commentary on its own context and an invitation to reflect on absence and elsewhere as philosophical conditions.  

Deeply resonating with this idea, the January 21, 2026 anniversary issue of Outlook magazine, explicitly titled “Party Is Elsewhere”, took the phrase as its conceptual anchor. Curated as a special 30th-anniversary edition, it brought together essays, fiction and art examining imagined worlds as forms of resistance, memory and hope in a moment marked by geopolitical tension, cultural censorship and displacement. The recurrence of the title across contexts suggests how powerfully the phrase continues to capture a shared sense of deferred belonging and speculative futurity.

That earlier installation featured 365 glasses that moved through a mechanical system. It was created at a time when India’s contemporary art market was growing quickly. 

An unpublished manuscript written by Vyjayanthi V. Rao, titled The Speculative City: A History of the Future, an excerpt of which appeared in Outlook magazine’s February issue, situates that moment with remarkable clarity. In that piece, Rao revisits Party Is Elsewhere not only as an artwork but as a lens through which to understand the speculative mood of mid-2000s Mumbai: a city where anticipation of future value began reshaping the present.

In 2004–05, Mumbai was in the midst of a physical transformation. Real estate markets were opening after decades of regulatory constraint. Rumours circulated about the demolition of solid stone colonial buildings in neighbourhoods like Girgaum Chowpatty and Gowalia Tank. Development Control Rules were reshaping the city through public–private partnerships and redevelopment schemes that often declared structurally sound buildings “dangerous.”

In that context, Shetty’s installation, Rao writes how wine glasses pounded against the walls of a gallery visible from the street, became more than a meditation on fragility. It staged a collision between spectacle and precarity, elite interiors and street-level spectatorship. Invited guests sipped champagne inside, while street children and office workers witnessed the installation from below. The neon sign reading Party is Elsewhere was both ironic and almost like a prediction of what was to come.

As the manuscript observes, the work revealed “mutations in value” that were transforming the relationship between city and citizen through deliberate acts of demolition, ostensibly to build more homes, yet often leaving the most vulnerable to “pick up the pieces.”

Two decades later, that phrase returns—not as repetition, but as extension.

From Mumbai to Delhi: The Idea Takes Shape

In Delhi, the curatorial team, Amit Kumar Jain and Reha Sodhi, stumbled upon a space that once functioned as a nightclub. It was dilapidated, half-forgotten, and architecturally raw.

“We were doing something exciting for a different space,” Sodhi recalled, “and then we came across this one. It was non-white cube, experimental. We all enjoy working in alternative venues.”

The moment they entered, the memory of Shetty’s installation resurfaced. The bar counter. The glasses. The residue of nightlife. The setting itself felt like an echo.

“In one of our first meetings,” Sodhi said, “we thought this is the most fitting place for Sudarshan’s work. And it hadn’t been shown so much in the public space. So we felt this show has to begin with it.”

The work belonged to the Devi Art Foundation’s collection. Both Jain and Sodhi were familiar with it. Once the conceptual anchor was set, the exhibition expanded outward, drawing primarily from two private collections and building a dialogue between them.

The borrowing of the title was not casual. The team ensured it was credited in all invitations and social media communication. The galleries and foundation were aware. The phrase itself is not copyright-protected; titles cannot be owned in isolation. But ethical acknowledgement mattered. 

“It was his title,” Shovan Gandhi, an artist , who was also the part of the curating team, explained. “We were borrowing it as it deemed fit”

However, Shetty told Outlook , he got to know about the exhibition through an Instagram post. 

Once a work enters a private collection, the collector has the right to loan and exhibit it. Agreements are signed between collector and exhibitor. Insurance is arranged. The artist may or may not be directly informed.

YS Alone, Professor in Visual Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University states it plainly: “As per ownership is concerned, it becomes an exclusive matter between the exhibitor and the collector.” Copyright arrangements depend on contracts. Unless explicitly retained, image rights may pass to the buyer.

Yet Shetty himself resists a rigid understanding of proprietary control.

“When a work is collected,” he reflected, “the intellectual property remains with the artist. But the work must also have a life beyond the artist. It must survive different contexts.”  He questioned whether Western frameworks of individual property adequately capture artistic production in South Asia, where authorship often emerges from collective and historical trajectories. 

For him, ownership in art is not straightforward. He believes that no artwork is created in isolation. Every artist is shaped by what they have seen, read, and experienced over many years, films, books, conversations, and history all become part of the work. Because of this, the idea of strict individual ownership does not always fit easily, especially in South Asia, where creative practices often grow out of shared cultural influences.

This connects to wider discussions in contemporary art. Philosopher Sherri Irvin says that when artists borrow or reuse ideas, it does not mean authorship disappears. Instead, responsibility shifts. The artist must acknowledge and explain the context of what they are borrowing, rather than pretending it is entirely original.

The art world, however, appropriates not only objects but language, and sometimes power.

In an essay for Ocula, critic Gautami Reddy explained that being invited into big, prestigious art spaces can be confused with actually having power. Just because someone is visible doesn’t mean they have real influence. Inclusion can become decorative, a gesture that appears progressive while leaving decision-making structures intact.

Party Is Elsewhere operated within this tension. It was drawn from private collections, yet staged in a space that feels anti-institutional. It critiques spectacle while benefiting from the art market’s infrastructure. It resists commercial polish while relying on collectors willing to lend significant works to a fragile environment. 

Sodhi acknowledges this risk. “It was bold of the collectors,” she said. “Many may not be comfortable putting their work in an environment like that.”

Breaking the White Cube

The curators cleaned the space but refused to sanitise it. In a way then, the space became art too. It was left almost untouched. Electrical wiring was added. Spotlights were hung. A sagging beam was left as it was. The holes in the wall were not covered up. The building’s wear and decay were not hidden. They were made part of the exhibition itself.

“We were tired of the usual white cube nature of things,” said  Gandhi. 

The white cube, long dominant in Delhi’s institutional ecosystem, promises objectivity. Yet, as many critics argue, its antiseptic walls also encode hierarchies of taste and access.

Here, captions were largely absent. No labels beside the works. No hierarchy of celebrity.

Sodhi clarified that information was available via a flow plan and trained staff for walkthroughs. But visually, the exhibition asked viewers to slow down, ask questions, and make connections without explaining every step in between.

Neha ‘Zoonie’ Tikoo, curator and performing artist, who also visited the exhibition, saw value in this strategy. Sometimes, she noted, removing titles allows audiences to encounter works without the “weight of the artist’s name.” Viewers respond more honestly when they are not primed by reputation.

“It becomes exclusive,” Alone argued. Those already familiar with artistic languages navigate easily; others may struggle.

The tension was productive. The exhibition sat between openness and opacity, refusing both over-explanation and elitist closure.

Works in Conversation

Early works by artists who would later define contemporary South Asian art appear here without spectacle, including Ayesha Sultana, Jitish Kallat, Bharti Kher, and Alwar Balasubramaniam.

A few steps away from the table lined with wine glasses were two life-size heads placed face to face.

One was made of sand. It showed a man smiling, calm and content. The other, cast in white, looked as if it is slowly breaking apart. It wad made of camphor. It slowly evaporates when exposed to air. Both heads were created in 2004, but while one remains steady, the other is quietly disappearing. 

Nasreen Mohamedi’s minimal lines resonated against chipped tiles. Rana Begum’s folds echoed architectural fractures. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s horizon photographs dissolved into Monika Correa’s woven expanses. Shilpa Gupta’s conceptual gestures sharpened against stained walls.

Sodhi described it as a visual conversation rather than a thematic one. Not every work “responds” directly to the title, she said, but each build on the spatial and emotional momentum initiated by Shetty’s installation. 

In the last room, the works seemed to move from one to the next almost like music. A folded shape became simple blocks of colour. A corner turns into a line. A diagonal fold shifted into a tilted horizon. The idea of the line moved quietly from one artist to another—subtle, gradual, and without being clearly announced.

Sodhi described it as a dialogue not only between works but between works and space. “You start with the title,” she said, “and then it builds into something else. How you start and how you finish is very different.”

Subodh Gupta, who was invited to be part of the exhibition, described it as “one of the best currently on view.” He was not involved in curatorial decisions, but admired the careful installation and the way the ruined building amplified the works’ presence.

“The space itself played a crucial role,” he said.

The Building as Argument

What ultimately distinguished the exhibition was how fully the building was allowed to speak.

The nightclub’s past as a place for parties, spending, and socialising still hung in the air. At the same time, Delhi’s art opening season, with its evening drinks and collector dinners, formed the backdrop.

In that setting, the neon sign felt less like a celebration and more like a quiet criticism of the scene around it.

As Rao reminds us that buildings declared “dangerous” were often structurally sound. Demolition was not merely physical but speculative, an economic decision disguised as necessity.

Inside the Delhi nightclub, the fragility of the glasses felt different. They trembled but refused to shatter. The building deformed but stood. The art market fluctuates. Titles travel. Ownership shifts.

Yet the work survives.

Shetty describes his work as something that must read differently in every space—kitchen, gallery, museum, street. 

In Delhi, the work carried memories of Mumbai’s rapid redevelopment. At the same time, it also reflected the social rituals of today’s art world—the openings, gatherings, and carefully staged events that shape how contemporary art is experienced.

The exhibition vanished. The building might become another bar. The works will return to storage or travel elsewhere.

But for a brief period, in a space neither fully public nor fully institutional, Party Is Elsewhere staged a conversation about value—of art, of buildings, of authorship.

The glasses tremble.

The building breathes.

And the party, as always, remains slightly out of reach.