An offering often begins with a small act. Flowers gathered and placed at a doorway in the morning. A lamp lit to honour the night. An alpana drawn across the entrance of a home, its patterns gradually worn away by the feet of those who enter. These gestures are repeated across generations, sometimes without much thought given to where they began. Yet each carries an understanding of what deserves our attention, and what we choose to give of ourselves.
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During the festive season, these everyday acts take on a particular significance. Time is set aside to prepare a home, arrange objects, make offerings and welcome the familiar and the unknown. The care lies as much in the making as in the finished form, in giving time to something whose impermanence is understood from the start.

At Nilaya Anthology, this relationship between making and meaning informs ‘The Art of Offering’, our festive presentation. Following last year’s The Art of Hosting, which explored the rituals through which we gather, this edition turns to the gestures, objects and traditions through which we express devotion. Across four spatial installations and a series of commissioned works, artists and makers draw from their own cultural inheritances, bringing personal interpretations of the sacred into form.
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THE ART OF OFFERING
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Four spatial installations by Ashiesh Shah, Masaba Gupta, Mayur and Tushar Vayeda, and Prerna Garg interpret this idea through their distinctly personal practices.
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Ashiesh Shah reinterprets Abhishekam, a ritual in which water is poured over a sacred form. Here, light takes the place of water, descending towards found copper vessels and returning through reflection. Set above a bed of rice, three forms sit in alignment, carrying an intimate ritual gesture towards a larger celestial relationship.

Masaba Gupta imagines a sanctuary in red where familiar gestures of offering assume deeply personal meanings. Red flowers, gold palms and candlelight build a space around an arrangement of cushions that invites a moment of pause within the intensity of the festive season.

Mayur and Tushar Vayeda begin with the elemental. A natural stone becomes a point around which soil, metal and light gather. Their installation draws from a Warli understanding of life as inseparable from the forces that sustain it, where repetition, cycles and relationships with the land shape both image and worldview.

Prerna Garg expresses offering through change. Ice becomes water, vegetation shifts and food extends the encounter through taste, smell, touch and sight. Her installation asks what it means to give something over to transformation without knowing precisely what may return.

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THE ANTHOLOGY RESIDENCY
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Every maker inherits a particular understanding of their practice, shaped by where they come from and the knowledge passed down through generations. When designers from different places work together, these histories enter into conversation, often revealing unexpected connections. Conceived by designer Aku Zeliang, ‘Across the Line’ is the inaugural edition of The Anthology Residency, bringing together eight pairings of emerging designers from India and Southeast Asia. Each partnership began with an exchange of ideas and techniques, inviting participants to explore how their distinct cultural histories might find expression in a shared work.
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The residency draws on Vishwakarma, the divine architect and maker in Vedic tradition, whose story connects the maker to their tools and the labour of creation. The designers brought their own experiences and ways of working to each partnership, responding to the possibilities and limitations they encountered along the way. The resulting objects carry traces of these exchanges and the decisions that shaped them. ‘Across the Line’ asks us to look beyond the finished object to everything that made its creation possible.

WHAT THE EYE REMEMBERS

Questions of inheritance and visual memory sit at the centre of ‘What the Eye Remembers’, a series of woven silk panels by Boito. In Odisha, the circular eyes, frontal gaze and graphic geometry associated with Jagannath extend beyond the temple into textiles, toys and everyday visual culture.

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Boito, founded by Richa Maheshwari, carries this geometry into Ikat and Habaspuri, while other panels draw on fish and turtles from Odisha’s coastal landscape. Through weaving, images move between sacred space, memory and contemporary expression, allowing familiar visual languages to acquire another life in cloth.

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GUARDIANS OF THE THRESHOLD
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The threshold offers another way into the season. Across South Indian temple traditions, points of passage have long been marked by yalis, Dvarapalas, lions and other protective figures. This territory becomes the starting point for ‘Guardians of the Threshold’, an exchange between contemporary studio potter Adil Writer and master terracotta artist T. Palanisamy.
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Palanisamy works at a monumental scale, drawing on generations of terracotta knowledge and building kilns around the sculptures he fires. Writer’s practice is rooted in glaze development, ceramic chemistry and soda, wood and gas firing. Without a common spoken language, much of their understanding developed through making itself. They watched one another work, demonstrated techniques, handled clay and made decisions around surfaces together. The creatures that emerge from the kiln carry evidence of that encounter in etched emblems, marble eyes, layered glazes and anatomies that move between the familiar and the invented.

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AN HOMAGE TO MAKING

Beauty resides in the attention and intention with which we make, observe and offer to something beyond ourselves. ‘The Art of Offering’ invites us to reflect on the significance of these gestures, however fleeting or enduring they may be. In the act of giving, something of ourselves passes into the world, acquiring meaning beyond what we could have imagined.

‘The Art of Offering’ is on view at Nilaya Anthology until 5th November 2026, unfolding across spatial installations, commissioned works and objects throughout the store.

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