Contextures: Event Programming
Alongside the exhibition Contextures: RMA and The Practice of Embedded Architecture, TARQ presents a series of events that extend its inquiry into architecture's public life. Across four sessions of walkthroughs and panel discussions, architects, critics, curators, and patrons come together to discuss the many forces that shape institutional buildings — the negotiations between patrons, clients, and users; the growing role of private philanthropy in cultural institutions; the craft of translating architecture into exhibition form; and the ongoing dialogue between criticism and practice. The programme brings the ideas behind RMA Architects' six featured projects into open conversation with the public.
Buildings and Their Publics
Saturday, 18th July 2026 | 05:00 PM – 06:30 PM
A walkthrough led by curator Ranjit Hoskote and architect Rahul Mehrotra examining the layered relationships that shape institutional architecture — between patrons who envision, clients who commission, and users who inhabit a building daily. Drawing on RMA's museum and university projects, they consider how Mehrotra's studio evolves designs for competing and overlapping constituencies, and how architecture might hold space for all three figures without privileging any single voice. A grounding conversation for the exhibition's central concern: architecture embedded in its social and environmental contexts.
About Patronage
Saturday, 25th July 2026 | 04:00 PM – 06:00 PM
A panel discussion on the evolution of cultural institutions in India in response to new publics and fresh challenges, and the role architecture plays in situating or extending these institutions. Jai Hiremath, Ranjit Hoskote, Jayshree Lalbhai, Rahul Mehrotra, and Sabyasachi Mukherjee — patrons, practitioners, and museum leaders — join curator Amruta Nemivant to discuss how private philanthropy now shapes museums, libraries, and cultural spaces once largely the domain of the state, and what this means for public access, accountability, and institutional design going forward.
Designing an Exhibition
Wednesday, 29th July 2026 | 05:00 PM – 06:30 PM
Exhibition Designer Zeenat Kulavoor of Bombay Duck Designs walks through the making of Contextures alongside Rahul Mehrotra, unpacking the choices behind translating six built projects — spanning museums and university buildings — as well as the curatorial framework and narrative into an accessible gallery display of drawings, models, and photographs. The session offers a behind-the-scenes look at how architectural work, often abstract and technical, is reframed for a public audience without losing its nuance or intent.
Oscillating between Criticism and Practice
Wednesday, 12th August 2026 | 05:00 PM – 06:30 PM
Ranjit Hoskote and Rahul Mehrotra join architect, critic and theorist Kaiwan Mehta — the troika are collaborators on the ongoing State of Architecture research project — for a conversation on the interplay between architectural criticism and practice. The discussion revisits Mehrotra's decades-long expansion of the architect's role beyond built form into pedagogy, advocacy, and civic activism, and considers how critique and design continually inform one another within what the three have termed a "radical contextuality."