How the Akanksha Children Found Their Colours

The Akanksha Foundation has spent decades working with children from underserved communities across India, providing them with access to education and opportunity that circumstances withheld. This exhibition is what happens when you add art to that equation. The children who made these works were taught to look at the world through the eyes of some of its most distinctive visual voices—Van Gogh, MF Hussain, Jamini Roy, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Banksy—and then asked to look at their own lives through the same eyes. What they found was not what you might expect, which is precisely the point.

The Starry Night returns here as the Bombay skyline, the swirling night sky of Provence replaced by a city these children know from the inside in ways that most of its residents never will. Tanjore painting, with its gold leaf and devotional intensity, is directed toward the people who matter most to them, their mothers, their gods, the faces that anchor their daily world. Banksy's stencil logic teaches them that art can be an act of claiming space, of placing yourself visibly inside a world that has not always made room for you. Through MF Hussain they find boldness. Through Georgia O'Keeffe they find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

The show is at 47-A Khotachi Wadi, a nineteenth-century Portuguese-style house in one of the last original village precincts that Bombay did not manage to erase, in the culturally rich and historically layered neighbourhood of Girgaum. The space has a quality of intimate seriousness that suits the work exactly. The show closes 7 June.

29 May to 7 June · 11 AM to 7 PM · Closed Mondays · 47-A Khotachi Wadi, Girgaum, Mumbai