Indian Ceramics Triennale 2027: AT PLAY

November 5 to December 23, 2027
National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai

What forces are at play, shaping and defining the world we experience? What impulses do we contain that form or override these forces?

Play is integral to the human experience and fundamental to the creative process. There is a tension inherent in play that is exhilarating yet risky, competitive yet collaborative. Through play we can put down the weight of a loaded past, imagine radical futures, and yet remain truly present. Play provides not only refuge, but resistance.

Play allows us a sense of joy, moving lightly between structure and chaos without fear of failure. It exists at the threshold of uncertainty – where systems can be questioned, patterns broken, conventions overturned. Play offers us the freedom to pivot, adapt and shape-shift, opening up space for thinking otherwise—about material, making, and consequently about the world we are part of.

In this third edition of the Indian Ceramics Triennale, we see the exhibition as an incubator of possibilities. We invite artists to hold this undefined and unknown moment filled with potential, to dare to play through inventiveness, provocation, humour, satire, meaning, absurdity, performance and colour. To use play as an institution of and for disruption, dreaming into existence the unexpected and unacknowledged. To question, through play, the forces at play.

The open call is open to professional and emerging artists over the age of 18, working in ceramics or exploring clay in interdisciplinary practices. While the Indian Ceramics Triennale focuses on clay based practices, we welcome proposals from artists working across disciplines who engage with clay conceptually, materially, or contextually.