American multidisciplinary artist Doug Aitken has always been attracted to the quiet logic of natural systems – how light reshapes a landscape, how a river finds its rhythm, how movement becomes a language. You see this sensibility in his practice: the mirrored house of Mirage (2017), shifting in and out of visibility with the desert sun; the roving cross-country experiment Station to Station (2013), which transformed a train into a creative ecosystem; Or Diamond Sea (1997), his early, contemplative look at a Namibian mining sector, where the landscape set the mood and pace. Even in Song 1 (2012), when the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC became a 360-degree projection surface, Doug viewed architecture in the same way he views nature – as something alive, sentient, and capable of holding emotion.
Doug Aitken | Photo Credit: Dhrupad Shukla/Floating Home Studio
Through it all, his tendency is not to dominate natural forces, but to harmonize with them: the patterns of light, the flows of motion, the places where the organic and the constructed quietly overlap. Doug’s work inspires us to look a little closer, listen a little more deeply, and recognize how much of our world hums beneath the surface.
On the first floor. Photo Credit: Dhrupad Shukla/Floating Home Studio
It is this sensibility – a kind of making as listening – that shapes Under the Sun, the artist’s first exhibition in India, now on display across three floors of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Center (NMACC) in Mumbai, curated by Roya Sachs C Mafalda Kahane and produced by Elizabeth Edelman, partner at international creative house, Triadic. He describes the exhibition as “almost like a novel, like a book”, with three separate but interconnected chapters that guide viewers from the geological through the technological to the transcendental. “I wanted to create an exhibition that you could join in and mingle with,” he tells me, “as opposed to something you just look at one after another.”
multisensory encounter
The first chapter, The Past, is almost literally sitting firmly on the ground. Here, Doug digs deep into time with tactile assemblies of carved wood, reclaimed debris, woven fabric and stained glass. Spiral wooden boats are surrounded by giant human figures rising from the ground. Their forms are created using a combination of robotic milling and hand-finishing, made from raw logs and wood sourced from across Gujarat. The bodies appear incomplete, as if caught in the middle of transformation, but their proportions are precise. He calls them “pixels of matter”; Structural modules that hold both the fragility and strength of the human presence.
Doug’s Film on the Second Floor, New Era | Featured photo credit: Dhrupad Shukla/Floating Home Studio
Along the surrounding walls, six textile hands depict the sacred rivers of India – a mix of custom digital weaving and painstaking embroidery done by a team of artisans in Mumbai. “I didn’t want to be that guy who makes something abroad and just brings it here,” he tells me, half laughing at the idea of “weird colonialism.” Instead, Under the Sun became a collaborative weaving of local craft and global vision. He recalls a young painter from Mumbai who helped him touch up a wooden sculpture during installation. “I said, ‘You should be an artist.’ He shows me his phones – these incredible concrete and brick sculptures – and suddenly we’re talking about his work, his aspirations. These bridges happen unexpectedly, and that’s when the art becomes something bigger than what’s in front of you.
Two-storey installation, Lightfall / Other Worlds | Photo Credit: Brian Doyle
If the past is earthly and tangible, the present is transformed into a digital reflection. On the Second Floor, Doug’s Movie new era Explores the life of Martin Cooper, the inventor of the mobile phone. Martin, now in his nineties, tells of his first wireless call – a moment that quietly changed the destiny of global communications. Screened within mirrored walls and changing screens, the film juxtaposes portraits of the inventor with sweeping natural landscapes, creating a visual dialogue between connection and solitude, invention and mortality. “Everyone from a farmer to a billionaire is connected to this web of instant information,” says Doug. “But what does this mean for your physical self? Your life cycle? What’s left when you’re gone?”
NEW ERA explores the life of mobile phone inventor Martin Cooper. Photo Credit: Stefan Altenberger
Then comes the future – a conceptual breakdown. The two-story installation, Lightfall/Other Worlds, is all color, movement and sound. At its center is a luminous sphere containing hundreds of suspended LED tubes, pulsating slowly in luminous waves. Visitors are encouraged to lie down on the wooden floor – an echo of the past – and let the changing light wash over them. “It’s like a hypnotic meditation,” Doug says, more sensation than symbol, vibration more than narrative. If the first floor makes us inert, the third makes us completely loose.
On the first floor. Photo Credit: Dhrupad Shukla/Floating Home Studio
What runs through all three chapters is an awareness of our changing relationships with place – natural, cultural, digital. Doug reflects humanity’s nomadic past, the desire to cross deserts, climb mountains, map landscapes. “And yet,” he says, “we are also living in a world that is more physical, more connected to screens and imagination. We are at a crossroads.” Under the Sun emphasizes remembering gently – by holding on to natural environments, biological systems, craft legacies – while still looking forward.
In that sense, the exhibition reflects Mumbai itself: a city on water, a city in motion, a city negotiating past, present and future in real time. And like Aitken’s best work, it leads us to a simple but profound question: What does it mean to be human in a world that is both extremely ancient and rapidly accelerating?
The exhibition will run at the Art House from December 6 to February 22, 2026; Tickets start at ₹250 but entry is free for children under 13, senior citizens and fine arts and media students
published – December 05, 2025 03:32 PM IST