ART MUMBAI Gateway travelled to Bengaluru on 29–30 May 2026 for a weekend of special visits and conversations across some of the city's leading arts and culture spaces. Part of the growing 2026 calendar of art events in India, the programme offered guests an immersive look at Bengaluru's contemporary art scene. Over two days, ART MUMBAI Gateway guests visited the Museum of Art and Photography, KAASH and RMZ Ecoworld 30.

Visit to MAP's Conservation Lab

The weekend began with a visit to Bengaluru’s Museum of Art and Photography’s Conservation Lab—one of the few publicly accessible conservation labs in an Indian art museum—followed by a walkthrough of their permanent exhibition, Beneath the Turning Sky.

The behind-the-scenes visit to the lab was led by Head of Conservation Dr Rini Templeton and her team, who brought forward interesting insights into how museum collections are preserved and maintained. They showed tools and techniques to conserve works on paper, canvas, metals and textiles. They explained how conservators are detectives, doctors and chemists in equal part—it is their job to investigate and dissect while maintaining the integrity of the object. An interesting fact guests learned is that all conservation must be reversible to account for future knowledge.

The visit moved into a walkthrough of Beneath the Turning Sky, an exhibition that draws on a wide range of periods, regions and mediums to explore how humanity has made sense of the world through art: through storytelling, imagination and reflection. It is an exhibition that asks visitors to slow down, to look across time rather than at a single moment—and in the hands of one of India's most significant art museums, it lands with considerable weight.

Earth Offerings at KAASH

Later in the evening, KAASH—an exhibition and education space dedicated to Indian collectible craft forms—hosted ART MUMBAI guests for a special curator-led walkthrough of Earth Offerings with Veeranganakumari Solanki. The exhibition explores work by Fastin Pedros, Savia Mahajan and Thembi Nala, three artists who use clay as their primary medium. Through the earth itself, the artworks examine totems, ritual offerings and ancestral knowledge, treating these not as relics but as living archives of human connection to the natural world. The evening concluded with cocktails and conversations.

RMZ Foundation's Sculpture Collection

The following morning, the focus shifted outdoors. ART MUMBAI Gateway organised a walkthrough of RMZ Foundation's sculptural collection at RMZ Ecoworld 30, Whitefield with the Foundation's Senior Curator, Kamna Anand. The collection enables visitors to reimagine the workplace through public art, culture and landscape—making it one of the most distinctive outdoor sculpture trails in South India. On display is an ambitious range of sculptures and site-specific installations, including Lantana Elephants by Bengaluru-based collective The Real Elephant Collective, one of the largest Subodh Gupta sculptures in a public collection in India, and an in situ work by British artist Patrick Goddard.

The three programmes offered three very different experiences—institutional, intimate and public—and represented the richness of contemporary art in India alongside the conversations happening within it.