Bairang is a band of individual practitioners, each doing their own thing, who show and publish together in episodes. The work sits between art and design. I curate it, and I am also one of the people in it. It continues what I called self-validation at the Museum of Vestigial Desire in 2013: the work you do on yourself before you can produce anything.
Most exhibitions invite you because your work already looks interesting, and then hand you a concept note to respond to. Here the order is reversed. Each invitation carries a provocation and asks for one work in response to it. Your work does not have to interest me already. I have to be able to read in it what you could do with this question, and that reading is the invitation. Some people are better at responding than at starting something of their own, and this suits them.
The first provocation: either my propagation or your reception
When something I make does not reach somebody, either I failed to send it or they failed to receive it. I can rarely tell which.
Make one work about something that did not arrive, with the question of whose failure it was left open inside the work. Any medium will do, including an essay.
Why
Anything can be produced and sent to everybody in seconds, and whether it arrived is still hard to know. I count nothing on what I publish, so I know this from the inside. Getting my story out into the world is my problem, and the world owes me nothing. When something does not land, I forget it and try again, pardoning everybody for the crime of not having reached me already.
How people come in
There is no open call. You can propose yourself as somebody I should invite. I look at what you have made, and if I see something to ask you, I invite you, and then you pitch.
How spaces come in
I do not apply to galleries with a concept. I write to galleries and spaces and ask them to pitch what they can offer an episode. I invite them to apply or pitch. If you run one, you can write first.
Where it stands
Bairang is mine, with Koher behind it. There is no venue, date or money yet. This is one thing that is happening. Chip in.
Prayas Abhinav
5 November 2026