Inside American artist Doug Aitken’s immersive new exhibition at NMACC, Mumbai

American multidisciplinary artist Doug Aitken has always been drawn to the quiet logic of natural systems — how light reshapes a landscape, how a river finds its own rhythm, how movement becomes a language all its own. You see this sensitivity across his practice: the mirrored house of Mirage (2017), shifting in and out of visibility with the desert sun; the roving cross-country experiment Station to Station (2013), which turned a train into a creative ecosystem; or diamond sea (1997), his early, contemplative gaze at Namibia’s mined terrain, where the landscape dictated the mood and the pace. Even in SONG 1 (2012), when the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. became a 360-degree projection surface, Doug approached architecture the way he approaches Nature — as something alive, responsive, and capable of holding a feeling.

Across all of this, his instinct is not to dominate natural forces but to tune into them: patterns of light, flows of movement, the places where the organic and the constructed quietly overlap. Doug’s work urges us to look a little closer, listen a little more deeply, and recognise how much of our world hums beneath the surface.

On the first floor
| Photo Credit:
Dhrupad Shukla/Floating Home Studio

It is this sensibility — a kind of listening-as-making — that shapes Under the Sun, the artist’s first exhibition in India, now unfolding across three floors of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) in Mumbai, which has been curated by Roya Sachs C Mafalda Kahane and produced by Elizabeth Edelman, partners of the international creative house, TRIADIC. He describes the exhibition as “almost like a novel, like a book,” with three distinct yet interconnected chapters that guide the viewer from the geological through the technological to the transcendental. “I wanted to make an exhibition you could fall into and dissolve into,” he tells me, “as opposed to something you simply see one after another.”

Multi-sensory encounter

The first chapter, Past, sits firmly in the Earth, almost literally. Here, Doug digs into deep time with a tactile assembly of carved wood, reclaimed debris, woven fabrics, and stained glass. Spiralling wooden boats sit encircled by monumental human figures rising from the ground. Their forms are carved using a combination of robotic milling and hand-finishing, made from raw logs and reclaimed wood sourced across Gujarat. The bodies appear unfinished, as if caught mid-transformation, but their proportions are precise. “Pixels of matter,” he calls them; structural modules that hold both the fragility and the force of human presence.

The second floor showcases Doug’s film, NEW ERA
| Photo Credit:
Dhrupad Shukla/Floating Home Studio

Along the surrounding walls, six textiles trace India’s sacred rivers across hands — a fusion of custom digital weaving and painstaking embroidery undertaken by a team of artisans in Mumbai. “I didn’t want to be that person who makes something abroad and just brings it here,” he tells me, half laughing at the idea of “awkward colonisation.” Instead, Under the Sun became a collaborative weave of local craft and global vision. He recalls a young painter in Mumbai, helping him touch up a wooden sculpture during installation. “I said, ‘You must be an artist.’ He shows me his phone — these incredible concrete and brick sculptures — and suddenly we’re talking about his work, his aspirations. These bridges happen unexpectedly, and that’s when art becomes something greater than what’s in front of you.”

The two-storey installation, LIGHTFALL / OTHER WORLDS
| Photo Credit:
Brian Doyle

If Past is earthy and corporeal, Present spirals into digital reflection. On the second floor, Doug’s film NEW ERA examines the life of Martin Cooper, the inventor of the mobile phone. Martin, now in his nineties, speaks about the first wireless call he ever made — a moment that quietly altered the destiny of global communication. The film, played within mirrored walls and shifting screens, juxtaposes portraits of the inventor with sweeping natural landscapes, creating a visual dialogue between connection and solitude, invention and mortality. “Everybody from a farmer to a billionaire is connected through this web of accelerating information,” Doug says. “But what does that mean for your physical self? Your life cycle? What’s left when you’re gone?”

NEW ERA examines the life of Martin Cooper, the inventor of the mobile phone
| Photo Credit:
Stefan Altenburger

Then comes Future — a perceptual rupture. The two-storey installation, LIGHTFALL / OTHER WORLDS, is all colour, motion, and sound. At its centre hovers a luminous orb containing hundreds of suspended LED tubes, pulsing gently in luminous waves. Visitors are encouraged to lie on the wooden floor — a grounding echo of the Past — and let the shifting light wash over them. “It’s like a hypnotic meditation,” Doug says, more sensation than symbol, more pulse than narrative. If the first floor roots us, the third loosens us entirely.

On the first floor
| Photo Credit:
Dhrupad Shukla/Floating Home Studio

What runs through all three chapters is an awareness of our shifting relationship with place — natural, cultural, digital. Doug reflects on humanity’s nomadic past, the urge to cross deserts, climb mountains, map landscapes. “And yet,” he says, “we’re also living in a world becoming more dematerial, more about screens and fiction. We’re at a crossroads.” Under the Sun gently insists on remembering — holding onto natural environments, organic systems, craft legacies — while still looking forward.

In that sense, the exhibition mirrors Mumbai itself: a city on water, a city in motion, a city negotiating past, present, and future in real time. And like Doug’s best works, it nudges us toward a simple but profound question: what does it mean to be human in a world that is both endlessly ancient and rapidly accelerating?

The exhibition will run from December 6 to February 22, 2026 at the Art House; tickets start from ₹250 but entry is free for children under 13, senior citizens and fine art and media students

Published – December 05, 2025 03:32 pm IST