Indian Ceramic Triennale (Common Ground, 2024),
Arthshila, New Delhi, India
January 19 to March 31, 2024
Curated by Anjani Khanna, Madhvi Subrahmanian, Neha Kudchadkar, Reyaz Badaruddin, Sharbani Das Gupta, and Vineet Kacker.
These individuals co-founded the Contemporary Clay Foundation, the organization behind the Triennale. In addition to the core curatorial team, Kanika and Sangeeta Kapila joined as curators in 2022.
Composed of porous, handmade clay tiles, Astha Butail’s interactive work serves as blank pages, to be marked with ink drops rather than scribed. The artist uses the conceptual and material characteristics of fired ceramics – the porosity of bisque fired clay that suggests voids and in between spaces that readily absorb – to mark time and empty space. As people drop blue ink onto the tiles, leaving traces and marks of their presence on the work, porosity becomes a metaphor for how traditions form. Modern life’s speed with the instant gratification offered by a click of a button has almost nullified the empty space; the patience to recite or learn in a slow-paced world is a rarity now. The blue of the ink, historically a rare and valuable colour, directly references the rarity of this opportunity
The second edition featured 34 projects by 60+ artists from 12 countries, exploring clay as a medium bridging tradition and innovation Astha Butail’s Work: Porosity of Tradition (2023) Installed as part of Common Ground, her interactive piece features handmade clay tiles that absorb drops of blue ink—each mark signifying the presence of the participant, the ritual of transmission, and the porous quality of tradition itself .
The work enacts a live archive: visitors intentionally activate the tiles, making the piece a sculptural metaphor for memory, multiplicity, and the slow-tempo pace of oral culture in contrast to instant digital consumption
Butail’s work dissolves the boundary between ‘artist’ and ‘audience’. By embedding visitor trace into the artwork, she transforms her ceramics into a participatory archive—one where memory and tradition are not handed down but co-authored by community touch and imprint. The porosity of fired clay becomes conceptual terrain: the bisque surface absorbs ink like empty memory, responding to time, touch, and encounter.
Curated with an ethos of dialogue between past, present, and future, this Triennale explores how histories embedded in clay speak to shared landscapes and cultural narratives. Butail’s piece fits naturally within this schema—not just crossing geographies, but deliberately threading personal myth and collective archive into clay’s sedimentary logic .The curatorial team sought works that transcend the decorative or functional expectations of ceramics. Butail’s intervention pushes clay into performative territory—an expressive, process-oriented medium that demands participation and reflection rather than mere display