13 November, 2026
06:00 PM - 07:00 PM
Aditya Birla Auditorium | On-site
What happens when a painter responds to a poem?
Taking its cue from the collaboration between poet Javed Akhtar and painter Baaraan Ijlal, this panel poses questions of how different forms of creative expression can act as translators for one another, bringing forth emotions, ideas, themes, thoughts and notions of belonging, care, community, and resilience in contemporary life.
The conversation turns on this act of translation - what a painter keeps, discards, or invents when a line of verse becomes an image, and what a poem gains when it is read back through a painting. Rather than illustration in the literal sense, the works function as complementary readings, one that follows Akhtar's written idioms and Ijlal’s visual language into the city's homes, migrant routes, and apartment blocks, finding in them aspiration and exhaustion, performance and collapse, with unexpected tenderness.
Moderated by Ranjit Hoskote, the discussion promises to move between craft and collaboration. How two artists working in entirely different mediums arrive at a shared vision, and what such partnerships reveal about the making of meaning across word and image.
Painting from the series, When No One Moves by Baaraan Ijlal. Image courtesy the artist.
Baaraan Ijlal is a self-taught artist based in New Delhi, India. Her multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sound, video, photography, embroidery and stone inscriptions, grounded in listening and sustained attention to people, places, language and memory. Her ongoing projects Change Room (2018–) and Hostile Witness (2014–) take shape through questions of anonymity, displacement, memory and erasure. Her works are held by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Devi Art Foundation and KADIST, Paris. She has exhibited at Hayy Jameel, Chintretsukan Gallery, Tokyo University of the Arts for SGFA- CRiSAP, CREA ReConference, KHOJ, Arte Laguna, Venice, and CSMVS, Mumbai. She received a KHOJ Peripheries & Crossovers grant and residencies at Sharjah Art Foundation, Conflictorium Museum and Sanskriti Kendra.
Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, translator, cultural theorist and curator. His poetry collections include Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin, 2014), Jonahwhale (Penguin, 2018; in the UK as The Atlas of Lost Beliefs by Arc, 2020), Hunchprose (Penguin, 2021), and Icelight (Wesleyan University Press, 2023). Hoskote’s acclaimed translations include I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011) and The Homeland’s an Ocean: Mir Taqi Mir (Penguin Classics, 2024). He has authored a book of essays on the painter Gieve Patel, To Break and To Branch (Seagull, 2024) and is co-editor of an international transdisciplinary anthology on the climate crisis, Practices of Hope: A Reader for the Future (Niyogi/ Goethe-Institut Mumbai, 2026). Hoskote curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011) and was co-curator, with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kin, of the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008). He served on the jury of the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), was a curatorial advisor to the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), and participated in the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2023). He is a founding member of the Advisory Board of the Bergen Assembly, a visual arts triennial in Norway. In January 2027, he will curate the inaugural edition of SITE Jodhpur, a biennale-scale platform for public art.
