Mumbai’s idea of belonging can mean many things: the places we carry with us, the people who shape us, or the feelings that are difficult to put into words. At Gallery FPH in Nariman Point, three artists approach these ideas through distinct visual languages in Belonging, a group exhibition running from November 1 to 15.
Featuring Najma Merchant, Lubina Agarwal and Avantika Khanna Pocha, the exhibition brings together abstract explorations of emotion, symbolic reflections on human behaviour and impressions of people and places. Each artist draws from a different personal journey, offering visitors varied ways to think about connection, memory and the experience of being.
Najma Merchant: Giving emotions shape through abstraction
Internationally collected abstract artist Najma Merchant has recently returned to Mumbai, a city closely tied to her early years. She grew up in Bandra, where she studied and worked in film, before travelling widely and eventually settling in California to raise her two sons. Her work has been exhibited and collected in India, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Scotland.
Merchant continued developing her art practice after the death of her son in Edinburgh, following a pedestrian collision. What began as an interest in painting’s therapeutic qualities has grown into an intuitive abstract practice centred on colour and expressive, multi-medium mark-making.
Her canvases become a way to formalise emotions and experiences that may be difficult to articulate. Drawing from her lifelong interest in film and art therapy, Merchant explores how time, memory and feeling can be translated into painted form. Her work asks how the many textures of living across time might find expression through colour and abstraction.
Lubina Agarwal: Symbols, stillness and reflections of human behaviour
Lubina Agarwal’s visual language has developed alongside three decades of work as a healer, homeopath, counsellor, teacher and facilitator of moon meditation circles and transformative retreats. Having worked in London, Auckland and Bali, she is now based in Mumbai.
Her approach to painting follows a similar instinct to her healing practice: listening to subtle currents in human experience and guiding them towards alignment. Symbols first appeared during her sessions as small pen drawings on scraps of paper, which she shared with patients as tools for reflection. In her Mumbai studio, these markings expanded from pen and charcoal into immersive acrylic canvases.
The works move beyond straightforward depictions of thought and emotion, creating spaces for the unsaid and the moments of quiet transformation that resist language.
Agarwal also explores anthropomorphic imagery, placing animals in human roles and situations. Through satire, symbolism and playful observation, these paintings examine power, justice, freedom, technology and our relationship with the natural world. Beneath their humour, she says, is a pointed question: are we watching human behaviour from a distance, or recognising ourselves in it?
Avantika Khanna Pocha: Finding the aura in people and places
Avantika Khanna Pocha’s work is shaped by three distinct environments: the mountains of Shimla, the river in Goa and Mumbai’s restless urban energy. Rather than recreating these places as literal landscapes, she translates them into impressions, sensations and memories through colour, line and form.
The faces in her paintings emerge from fleeting encounters across Mumbai. Their expressions and stories linger, becoming fragments of the city’s human landscape.
In this, Pocha explores the unseen energy that remains in people, places and moments. The work brings together the quiet connections between her three worlds, capturing the atmosphere and emotional traces that can make a place, or an encounter, feel familiar.
More details:
Where: Gallery FPH, Free Press House, Nariman Point, Mumbai
When: November 1 to November 15, 2026
