Surjavo Sen Gupta reimagines a multisensory art gallery as a space for restoration and ocular relief through his time as a walk leader at the Flowing Heritage exhibition at Arthshila.
Editor’s note: This piece discusses the need for visual relief and multisensory engagement within art and in this regard, would encourage the readers to take a break from reading. The following audio piece serves as an alternative method of engaging with this piece. Featuring an audio walkthrough of the gallery by Surjavo Sen Gupta, it includes briefs discussion of some of the theoretical topics discussed in this essay, all within an auditory soundscape attempting to replicate the art gallery’s environment. Using headphones is recommended. Rest, flow, and re-orient.
Introduction
Arthshila Delhi, the newest addition to the constellation of art centres established across India by the Takshila Educational Society, hosted a multidisciplinary craft exhibition titled Flowing Heritage: The Indian Water Narrative, which was on view between February 1 and April 27, 2025. It aimed to examine the dynamic nature of water particularly in light of Indian cultures, traditions and beliefs. The exhibits were curated by Anjana Somany, with scenography handled by Aparna Nambiar and Abhay Narkar.
This exhibition was notable for its multisensorial approach, with tactile and tech-aided installations, audio explorations and luminary showcases to offer a panoramic view of water’s cultural, spiritual and creative influences in India. History, culture, and craft were expertly woven together to showcase its continued relevance both as a precious resource and a divine vessel. To avoid any overlap of such disparate ideas, Flowing Heritage was split into three sections across three floors. The first reimagined the gallery space as a baoli — a traditional stepwell found in the arid regions of North India where underground water could be accessed through descending stairs. The second aimed to unpack the “life-giving” connotation attached to water by tracing its links with the kalaśa (pot) and the bīja (seed), and the third utilised the narratological devices of several local storytelling traditions to highlight stories about water in the Indian context. My connection with Flowing Heritage stemmed from my role as walk leader — I was required to curate walkthroughs for people visiting on weekends throughout the exhibition’s run.
My first-hand experience witnessing visitors engage with the exhibits significantly informs my postulation that Flowing Heritage represents a reactionary turn away from the ocular-dominated gallery space, instead favouring a multisensory mode of engagement. By examining the strategies employed in this exhibition, this essay proposes that Arthshila staged the gallery as a space oriented toward promoting a restorative experience for its visitors.
Visual fatigue and the crisis in contemporary art
By the term ‘visual fatigue’, I refer to a form of exhaustion that operates on both intellectual and physical levels while simultaneously emphasizing the visual saturation of our era — an age of instant communication defined by new information technologies, an all-encompassing media culture, and nonstop consumption. The prioritization of productivity and efficiency is a legacy of work life dating back to the Industrial Revolution (Stephens 2024), but today, our minds and eyes are specifically subjected to hyperstimulation and information overload. This ocular overstimulation is evident in Pochmara’s observations as well:
Many of the stimuli that the new technologies bombard us with are cultural commodities. With a plethora of activities to choose from, such as binge-watching, playing freemium games, or following sporting events, our time is a battlefield for the entertainment industry (Pochmara 2023, 4).
Alongside this plethora of options offered by the entertainment media lies another insidious development — the fetishisation of turning oneself into an ‘interesting person’. In this age of acceleration, the preoccupation with being an interesting person as a human need has transformed into what Michael Gardiner calls “a feverish entrepreneurialism of the self. (Gardiner 2019, 248)” This imperative to keep working on yourself with no end in sight once again reaches us through our visual apparatus, with scores of self-help books and particularly reels on social media platforms where influencers sell the promise of a busier but more ‘fulfilling’ life. Echoes of this project can also be seen in Byung-Chul Han’s writing where he astutely remarks that our society has shifted from a Foucauldian “should” society to an achievement or “can” society (Han 2015, 8); it is the visual which prevents our neurons from resting, subjecting them to an excess of positivity that is the leading cause for ailments like ADHD, BPD, and burnout syndrome.
Turning to the visual arts and exhibition practices, these have privileged the ocular dimension since time immemorial. In his foundational essay on the historical reasons for the emergence of the white-cube gallery space, Brian O’Doherty contends that even the human body within the gallery becomes incidental:
The space offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, space-occupying bodies are not — or are treated only as kinaesthetic mannequins for further study (O’Doherty 2000, 15).
Tracing the white cube’s development from the 19th-century European salon exhibitions where paintings were essentially bunched together on a single wall, he argues that this shift resulted from each painting’s perspectival recession, allowing it to function as a “self-contained entity, isolated from its slum-close neighbour by a heavy frame without and a complete perspective space within” (O’Doherty 2000, 16). This conception of art reached a crisis point with the arrival of photography, forcing visual art to abandon gilded frames and embrace flatness over perspectival depth as more desirable.
I wish to make the argument that art is facing yet another crisis today — one that challenges the medium’s very “visual” dimension. For the sheer multiplicity of images infiltrating our vision minute-by-minute has precipitated as visual fatigue, thereby demanding that art reorient itself. This perpetual bombardment of imagery has rendered us numb; what we see no longer affects us, it fails to ‘move’ us — that fundamental quality through which art has historically defined itself. Originally conceived to depict religious subjects, art’s raison d’être was its capacity to stir something within us, whether subliminally or overtly. For art was always about affect — that which moves hearts and minds. It is precisely this imperative that necessitates art’s engagement with our other senses, an achievement the first part of Flowing Heritage realises particularly well.
Baoli and the mind-body-environment for restoration
Upon entering the first gallery in the Flowing Heritage exhibition, visitors encountered a space carefully arranged to evoke the feeling of a baoli. The gallery featured constructed stairs that visitors were encouraged to climb, narrow gaps they could explore, and sensory curios that engaged more than just sight. As visitors ascended the stairs, their movements would gently shift a tray of water with tiny shishas (mirrors) at the top, creating shimmering reflections and delicate sounds. Along one wall, visitors could listen to ‘whispered voices’ emanating from a ghada (earthen pot) — a subtle nod to the historical role of baolis as spaces for communal gathering and conversation. While there were also two screens playing videos on baolis and related architectural marvels as well as some wall exhibits, the primary focus of the first section remained the gallery space itself. Even these videos were visually unobtrusive, available for viewing but not demanding attention. Two more ghadas, this time infused with scents, invited olfactory engagement — one evoked the earthy aroma of petrichor, while the other offered a more ambiguous fragrance, drawing deep-seated memories from the interstices of the mind. Visitors were encouraged to jot these recollections down on slips of paper provided nearby. This section of the exhibition concluded with a performative installation by Rhea John. Her calming voice, audible through headphones provided to the visitors, served as a guide through the remainder of the gallery space, her narration harmoniously weaving together what could be seen and what could be touched.
I contend that for the purposes of Flowing Heritage, the gallery functioned as a “restorative environment” — a concept emerging in environmental psychology in the 1990s that suggests museums (here extended to galleries) can have wellbeing benefits for visitors (Kaplan et al. 1993, 726). The notion of a restorative environment stems from Attention Restoration Theory (ART), developed by Kaplan in 1995 which provides a framework for understanding how certain environments can help individuals recover from mental fatigue and restore psychological resources. At the core of ART is a distinction between two types of attention: directed attention and involuntary attention, also referred to as fascination. Directed attention requires conscious effort and is employed in tasks demanding focus, such as problem-solving or analytical thinking. This form of attention is finite and easily fatigued, often resulting in stress and cognitive depletion. In contrast, involuntary attention occurs effortlessly when individuals encounter inherently engaging stimuli, allowing directed attention to rest and recover (Kaplan 1995, 172).
Returning to the concept of the restorative environment, Kaplan et al. identify four properties that together characterize such environments: being away, extent, fascination, and compatibility. “Being away” refers to an environment that is distinct from everyday life and concerns. “Extent” implies an environment that is coherent and immersive enough, spatially and/or conceptually, to be entered and explored over time. “Fascination” describes an environment with inherently engaging qualities that hold attention effortlessly and allow directed attention to rest and recover. Finally, “compatibility” requires that the environment supports the visitor’s intentions rather than working against them.
With this idea of the restorative environment, I wish to bring in the mind-body separation that has dominated modern Western thought and is also deeply embedded in biomedicine and healthcare education. Commonly referred to as Cartesian dualism after the French philosopher René Descartes, this perspective understands the body largely as a mere transporter of the mind. Subsequent thinkers, however, have thoroughly contested this position, and the material body is now understood to harbour and communicate information in its own right — a shift often discussed within phenomenological discourse. Soulé et al. (2022, 2) have pointed out that when the primary focus of healthcare education and professional practice is cognitive knowing, the physical body with its sensations, emotions, affective processes, and visceral responses is excluded as another important way of knowing.
My proposition of a “visual fatigue” in the art world fits squarely here. The incessant visuality of art combined with the visually saturated nature of contemporary culture has limited the reception of artworks primarily to the mind, and any embodied engagement with the work is a scarce occurrence. This is where the mind-body-environment triad becomes critical.
Conclusion
An exhibition like Flowing Heritage which reimagines the entire gallery space as a baoli moves away from older notions of the white cube that privilege intellectual engagement with ahistorical modern art toward a more embodied experience. Historically inspired materials such as diagrams and video clips of actual baoli sites were presented within an immersive spatial framework that simultaneously invited visitors to contribute their own thoughts, feelings, and narratives, creating a richer and more holistic experience. The Cartesian mind–body split on which the white cube has traditionally relied through a primarily ocular engagement with art, gets effectively displaced by Flowing Heritage’s baoli manoeuvre.
The exhibition aimed to create a restorative environment defined by Kaplan’s four properties: being away, with the space separate from the humdrum of everyday life and distinct from a conventional gallery; extended, as audiovisual elements enabled a temporally prolonged experience; fascinating, with all of the visitor’s senses engaged with the sole exception of taste; and compatible, as the seemingly disparate works remained aligned with the purpose of offering an experience akin to stepping into a stepwell for the visitor. Flowing Heritage: The Indian Water Narrative in this way serves as an exercise in artistic practice, embracing fuller sensory immersion and opening new avenues for audience connection beyond the purely visual.
About the author
Surjavo Sen Gupta (he/him) is an MA student at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His research focuses on the intersections of visual culture, media studies, and social history, examining how artistic and institutional frameworks interact to reflect and influence cultural consciousness.
References
Gardiner, Michael. 2019. “Postscript: Not Your Father’s Boredom.” In Boredom Studies Reader: Frameworks and Perspectives, edited by Michael Gardiner and Julian Jason Haladyn, Taylor & Francis Group.
Han, Byung-Chul. 2015. The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press.
Kaplan, Stephen. 1995. “The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15 (3): 169-182.
Kaplan, Stephen; Lisa V. Bardwell, Deborah B. Slackter. 1993. “The Museum as a Restorative Environment.” Environment and Behaviour, 25 (6): 725-742.
O’Doherty, Brian. 2000. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. University of California Press.
Pochmara, Anna. 2023. “Bored Again: Acceleration, Anxiety, and Boredom in Late Modernity.” European Journal of American Studies 17 (4): 1-11. https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.18973.
Soulé, Isabelle; Chloé Littzen-Brown; Amber L. Vermeesch; Layla Garrigues. 2022. “Expanding the Mind–Body–Environment Connection to Enhance the Development of Cultural Humility.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19: 13641. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192013641.
Stephens, Elizabeth. 2024. “Efficiency and the Productive Body: The Gilbreths’ Photographic Motion Studies of Work.” Body & Society 30 (3): 59–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X241262176.
