Merch and Memorabilia
Highlights
The festival featured a two day programme, curated with back to back performances and cultural exchanges unfolding across various disciplines and thematics.
2 day programme roster
Courtesy of our fellow artists, patrons, collaborators, volunteers and sponsors for making this festival possible. A special thanks to Kala kutir along with the UNESCO team and Sound of Women in bringing this festival to life.
"We found the future in the trash"
6 Workshops
Space Visualizations
Arts and Culture
Creative Direction
Spatial design
Mixed Media
Agra Arts festival | Agra [2025]
AAF was a part of my Professional Studio course with Studio exit (Exhibition Design batch of 2022) under the mentorship of Tanishka Kachru. AAF emerged during our residency at Kala Kutir, an art residency in Agra founded by Kaleem Ahmed. The festival repositioned Agra beyond the Taj Mahal, foregrounding the city’s diverse arts, crafts, and cultural practices often overlooked by mainstream tourism.
Structured around the theme Din–Shaam–Raat, programming unfolded from day to evening to night, with performances responding to shifting atmospheres and audiences. Featuring over 30 artists, 6 workshops, multiple patrons and sponsors, AAF operated as a collaborative cultural platform rooted in collaborations, local engagement and participatory design efforts.
Over 50 artists across diverse avenues were brought together from storytellers, performance artists, puppeteers, dancers, musicians, writers, Qawwalis and shayars along with local home cooks serving regional food and voices often unseen, including acid attack survivors all under a single platform hosting multiple cultural exchanges.
50+ Artists and patrons
View Report↗
"Iconography"
I worked with the spatial design team for the festival, constructing the entire environment from scratch using bamboo scaffolding as primary structures. We designed the stage, façade, entrance, lamps, and stalls, treating structure as both framework and identity. The modular system defined performance zones and circulation while remaining lightweight, reusable, and sustainable with minimal waste.
The festival also featured six workshops designed to engage participants across all age groups, creating spaces for hands-on learning, dialogue, and collaboration. Each workshop responded to a different aspect of Agra’s cultural landscape — from Heritage walks to zine making to collage to cleanup drives to photowalks to games to educational workshops.
We Found the Future in the Trash was a three-hour participatory workshop by Dhruvraj Jadeja at Battiskhambha that reframed cleanup as a cultural workshop. Set within a neglected heritage site, it invited residents, artists, and students to treat discarded objects as fragments of memory, reading waste as evidence of how we consume, forget, and move through the city. A live A live set was played simultaneously within the monument, playing subtly in the back. Participants collected objects, wrote speculative micro-stories about their journeys, and sealed selected pieces into a time capsule to be reopened a year later. The workshop positioned conservation not as maintenance, but as collective authorship and hoped to change the monument into a living heritage site.
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