ask, a glass of water.
share, enjoy
Wenceslaus Mendes
PREVIEW: 21st August 2026, 11am to 8pm
On view from 22nd August 2026, onward
Mon -Fri, 10:30am to 6:30 pm
Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation
K29, near Vijay Sales, Central Market,
Lajpat Nagar II, New Delhi
Wenceslaus Mendes brings together Goa Water Stories, Two-Thirds of Us, and kalchi kodi. These three ongoing bodies of work draw on community practice, research, image-making, listening, writing, mapping, food and the unbound book.
Goa Water Stories grows from exchanges and shared enquiry with communities across Goa, where lived experience, oral histories, ecological practice and local expertise converge across rivers, wells, wetlands, khazan lands and the coast. Two-Thirds of Us follows a sustained, close-grained inquiry into the politics of water, its movement, access, governance, memory and the uneven worlds it produces. kalchi kodi moves through the materiality and sensorial life of fish curry and rice, smell, taste, touch, seasons and the everyday practices through which culture is carried.
Together, the works ask how knowledge is made, held, shared and disseminated. They attend to histories that have been othered, embodied skills, ecological observation, fieldwork, photographs, maps, recipes, stories and collective encounters as active forms of knowing. The exhibition approaches water as a relation and a form of embodied knowledge, carried through labour, memory, sensory practice, and the everyday ways communities live with monsoons, rivers, wetlands, and the sea, shaping livelihoods, bodies, ecologies, and imaginaries.
Share, enjoy becomes an invitation to encounter these worlds sensorially and politically, and to consider what it means to receive from them, participate in them, and care for their continuance. Water’s futures remain inseparable from the communities who live, work, remember, share and imagine with it in their everyday, collective lives.
Wenceslaus Mendes was supported by the Mrinalini Mukherjee Creative Arts Grant 2024.
