There is a question that floats through every Indian wedding like a small talk made ritual - आप किसकी तरफ से? Whose side are you on? The bride's or the groom's?
It is asked with ease, with warmth, with the assumption that everyone present has a clear and legible place in the occasion. It maps belonging. But there is always a guest standing somewhere in the crowd for whom the question cuts far deeper. Which side are you on? The celebration, or its margins?
Aksh Diwan Garg's debut solo exhibition takes its name from this deceptively simple exchange, not to answer it but to inhabit its ambiguity and find something luminous there. To make art from that question is itself an act of resistance. Because in a country where the Supreme Court, in October 2023, handed the question of queer love and queer persons’ right to marry back to a Parliament that has never suggested it, the simple act of painting their longing as art is political. It is rebellion dressed in the brightest colours.
Wedding Season आप किसकी तरफ से? is a narrative series of oil paintings set in North Indian weddings. Rendered in warm pinks, purples, and sun-drenched yellows, the canvases are populated not by the bride and groom, but by the guests. The mausis in bold jewellery, the hands adorned in mehendi, the cousins around scrumptious food, the eye rolls, the comments, the dancing in the baraat. Aksh observes the wedding not as a celebration he belongs to, but as a theatrical performance he has always watched from just slightly outside the frame. In Aksh’s paintings, his figures are poised and adorned. The women, who emerge as the true protagonists of this series, carry themselves with grace. Aksh traces back to his mother and aunts who shaped his earliest understanding of the world. In painting them, he becomes them, dressing them in colours he would choose for himself, expressing through them what he has always carried within.
Aksh's eye, trained on the margins, does not stop at the question of who is invited. It lingers on who pays, who serves, who bends, and who is watched while bending. The bride's side carries a debt no one writes down. The bills quietly absorbed, the plates counted twice so nothing is wasted, the aunts hovering near the buffet not to eat but to manage, to ensure the family is not seen as careless with the generosity it worked so hard to afford. This is the other ledger of an Indian wedding, kept by women, balanced by women, and rarely acknowledged by the families who benefit from it. Aksh paints this quiet sacrifice with the same tenderness he extends to its glamour, because he understands they are the same gesture.
The wedding then becomes something stranger and more complex for the quiet observer this series centres. It is a spectacle and grief at once. A place to lose yourself briefly in someone else's joy while sensing that the same families celebrating the night might not know how to celebrate a life lived differently. Those very rituals being performed, the pheras, the sindoor, the saat vachans, carry the weight of a legal and social recognition that remains, in India, unevenly distributed.
Sequins catch the light, garlands hang heavy, and somewhere in the crowd, a guest is asked whose side they're on. They smile. They answer. And in that moment lives a knowledge that has no place in the conversation, much like the women around them, who carry their own weight, their own debts, their own quiet vigilance, also unspoken. But in this exhibition, both find their place. They belong.
Curated by Mihir Thakkar