Six working pavilions — visual arts, performing arts, architecture, music, literature, cinema — programmed seven days a week with curator talks, residencies and field labs. We co-curate with twenty-four museum partners across four continents, hold one hundred and forty-two archaeological reconstructions in walkable VR, and host forty-eight live performance residencies a year. The pavilions are open until the small hours; the curator tour starts when the rest of the campus has gone to bed.
Six houses, each with a permanent collection and a current season.
Each pavilion runs its own programming, its own residents, and its own field lab. Click through for the full programme, the archive, and the application briefs.
Pavilion · visual-arts
Visual Arts
A pavilion built around six rotating galleries — Indus seal carvings, Mughal miniature, Pahari and Rajput schools, Bengal modern, Tantric devotional, and a contemporary South-Asian wall that refreshes every twelve weeks. We co-curate with a regional state museum in Western India, a Tier-1 art collection in Central Europe, and a public ethnographic archive in West Africa. All cataloguing is done in IIIF; every artefact carries a provenance card, a conservation log, and a "study this object" link that opens a 4K turntable with annotated detail crops.
Now on
Salt, Ash, Ochre — pigment archaeology across three continents
On view through 14 September. Curator-led midnight tour every Friday.
A 480-seat black-box theatre, a 96-seat thrust stage for chamber work, and an open kalari floor for movement labs. The pavilion runs a year-round repertory in Kathakali, Kutiyattam, Yakshagana, Bharatanatyam, Odissi, Manipuri, Sattriya, and contemporary Indian dance, with an annual exchange with a Tier-1 conservatory in East Asia and a national ballet from Eastern Europe. Every production is filmed in multi-camera, archived with annotated tala/laya tracks, and released on the internal study channel within 14 days.
Now on
Repertory season — Kutiyattam cycle of the Ramayana, six evenings
A working library of one-twentieth scale built models, photogrammetric scans, and stone-by-stone construction films of vernacular and monumental architecture from the subcontinent and the wider Indian Ocean world. We hold a permanent Vāstuśāstra reading room with seventeen treatises, plus a CAD/CAM bay where students reconstruct missing portions of damaged temples and submit their proposals to a peer-review panel. Field trips are offered each quarter to a step-well district in Western India, a rock-cut cave complex in the Deccan, and a wooden vernacular village in the Eastern Himalaya.
Now on
Step-wells of the Saurashtra peninsula — fourteen sites, in stone
Studio applications for the Konark restoration brief open 1 July.
Two recording suites tuned to Indian classical pitch, a Western chamber room with a refurbished concert grand, and a digital lab for raga analysis using our own pitch-class histogram tool. The pavilion holds the largest accessible Hindustani and Carnatic concert archive on the campus (38,200 hours), with searchable rāga, tāla, gharānā, and artist filters. We run a year-round residency for two North-Indian classical vocalists, one Carnatic vocalist, one Dhrupad pair, and one fusion-composer-in-residence drawn from the wider Indian Ocean world.
Now on
Listening series — the bandishes of three twentieth-century gharānās
Monsoon concert cycle opens 12 July with an all-night raga Megh.
A reading room for Sanskrit, Tamil, Pali, Persian, Apabhraṃśa, Brajbhāṣā, and modern Indian languages, with parallel translations into English and a working Devanāgarī OCR pipeline trained on palm-leaf and birch-bark scripts. We host writers-in-residence in poetry, translation, and long-form non-fiction; the pavilion runs a quarterly little magazine, an annual translation prize, and a weekly close-reading seminar that has, over four years, worked through the Raghuvaṃśa, the Cilappatikāram, the Kathāsaritsāgara, and Mīr Taqī Mīr.
Now on
Palm-leaf to print — six centuries of Malayalam book history
Translation slam, 28 June. Eight poems, four languages, two hours.
A 220-seat screening room with 4K laser projection, a 70mm-capable second house, and a film-print archive of 1,840 reels held in a climate-controlled vault at 4°C and 35% RH. The pavilion programmes a Parallel Cinema retrospective every spring, a regional cinema series every autumn, and a documentary brief that pairs final-year film students with a working researcher elsewhere on the campus. We also operate a small-batch film scanner for personal 8mm and 16mm rescue projects donated by alumni families.
Now on
The long shadow — Ritwik Ghatak and the displaced subject
Twelve events across the six pavilions this week. Talks, recitals, screenings, classes — and a curator tour that begins at midnight every Friday.
Mon09
00:00 IST
Midnight curator talk — Tantric devotional
Lead curator
Visual Arts
Lecture hall
Talk
Mon09
18:30 IST
Open rehearsal — raga Multani in three gharānās
Resident vocalist
Music
Auditorium
Concert
Tue10
07:00 IST
Kathakali pre-dawn body class — caltus and mudra
Visiting āśān
Performing Arts
Studio
Class
Tue10
20:00 IST
Close-reading — the Mātṛkā chapter of the Kathāsaritsāgara
Reader-in-residence
Literature
Auditorium
Seminar
Wed11
11:00 IST
Site film — the step-wells of Adalaj and Rani-ki-Vav
Visiting architect
Architecture
Auditorium
Film
Wed11
19:30 IST
Parallel Cinema series — a 1973 Malayalam debut
Programmer
Cinema
Auditorium
Screening
Thu12
06:15 IST
Vedic chant recital — Rg-Veda first mandala, suktas 1–10
Resident chanter
Music
Auditorium
Recital
Thu12
17:00 IST
Conservation lab open hours — pigment cross-section bench
Conservator
Visual Arts
Auditorium
Lab
Fri13
15:00 IST
Polynesian wayfinding — star-compass lesson on the courtyard
Visiting navigator
Performing Arts
Studio
Class
Fri13
00:00 IST
Friday midnight tour — Salt, Ash, Ochre exhibition
Lead curator
Visual Arts
Auditorium
Tour
Sat14
19:00 IST
Open-air screening — a 1996 Iranian feature, subtitled
Programmer
Cinema
Auditorium
Screening
Sun15
10:30 IST
Translation workshop — three sonnets from the Brajbhāṣā
Translator-in-residence
Literature
Auditorium
Workshop
Archaeological VR catalogue
Walk Hampi at first light. Climb Borobudur at any hour.
Sixteen reconstructions from the working catalogue of one hundred and forty-two. Each is rebuilt from photogrammetry, period survey drawings, and the published archaeological literature. Click to open the room.
Le Ménec, Kermario, Kerlescan alignments and tumuli.
30 min tour
Megalithic rows
Borobudur
Central Java
8th – 9th c. CE
Kāmadhātu, Rūpadhātu, Arūpadhātu galleries with reliefs.
48 min tour
Mahayana stupa
Angkor Wat & Bayon
Cambodia, mainland SE Asia
9th – 15th c. CE
Angkor Wat, Bayon, Ta Prohm, royal hydraulic network.
64 min tour
Khmer temple-city
Great Zimbabwe
Southern Africa
11th – 15th c. CE
Hill complex, Great Enclosure, conical tower, soapstone birds.
32 min tour
Stone-walled city
Lalibela Rock Churches
Ethiopian Highlands
12th – 13th c. CE
Bete Medhane Alem, Bete Giyorgis, subterranean passages.
36 min tour
Monolithic churches
Live performance residencies
Eight artists, in residence, on the campus, for one year.
A residency model that pairs each artist with a graduate student team, a public output, and an archive deposit.
The structure
Twelve months in residence with a studio, a stipend, and a graduate student team. Eight residents at a time, chosen from open call. Each cohort is mixed across disciplines so that a Dhrupad pair, a Kathakali āśān, and a documentary filmmaker overlap and feed one another's work.
The output
One open class a month, one public performance a quarter, and one annual season piece. The annual piece tours to two partner cities each year, with all rehearsals and final cuts archived to the pavilion library. Every public hour is offered free to students.
The deposit
At the end of the residency the artist deposits notation, scores, sketches, or annotated film cuts into the open archive under a permissive license for study purposes. The pavilion commits to keep the deposit accessible in perpetuity, both online and on physical media in the climate-controlled vault.
A
Resident A
Hindustani vocal (Khayāl)
From Delhi gharānā lineage
Jul 2026 – Jun 2027
A bandish-book of monsoon ragas, sung and notated.
B
Resident B
Carnatic vocal
From Thanjavur, South India
Jul 2026 – Jun 2027
Tana-varṇam cycle for student instrumentalists.
C
Resident C
Dhrupad (jugalbandi pair)
From Darbhanga lineage
Aug 2026 – Jul 2027
Ālāp pedagogy from the perspective of breath-economy.
D
Resident D
Kathakali (āśān)
From Central Kerala kalari
Jun 2026 – May 2027
A new score for the Bhima episode, with chenda ensemble.
E
Resident E
Odissi (chowka & tribhangi)
From Coastal Odisha
Jun 2026 – May 2027
Movement vocabulary as taught from temple sculpture.
F
Resident F
Translation, Tamil to English
From Madurai region
Sep 2026 – Aug 2027
A new selection from the Cilappatikāram, with notes.
G
Resident G
Documentary cinema
From Eastern Himalaya
Oct 2026 – Sep 2027
A long-form film about a single saltern over one year.
H
Resident H
Architecture & restoration
From Saurashtra peninsula
Aug 2026 – Jul 2027
Step-well restoration brief with a regional water board.
Cultural literacy track
Twelve weeks across the world's cultures, in conversation.
A flagship reading-and-viewing curriculum, open to every student on the campus. One topic a week, one essay at the end. Sign up below — the next cohort begins on the first Monday after the monsoon.
W01
Cave to script — visual culture before writing
Bhimbetka, Lascaux, Chauvet, the Apollo 11 stones
W02
River-valley civilisations
Indus, Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Yellow River
W03
Classical cosmologies
Vedic, Greek, Egyptian, Mayan calendrical thought
W04
The Indian Ocean world
Monsoon trade, Swahili coast, Cholas, Srivijaya
W05
Silk routes — overland and maritime
Sogdian, Tang, Persian, and Khotanese exchange
W06
Polynesian voyaging
Star compass, wave pattern, and the long migration
W07
African empires of gold and salt
Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Great Zimbabwe
W08
Pre-Columbian Americas
Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Inca; Cahokia and the Mississippian
W09
Sacred architecture — comparative reading
Stupa, ziggurat, pyramid, temple, cathedral, masjid
W10
Performance traditions
Noh, Kathakali, Beijing Opera, Greek tragedy
W11
Modernity and translation
Bengal Renaissance, Negritude, Latin American boom