Games People Play 02 | 2025
October 6, 2025
Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi
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Games People Play 02 at Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, is conceived as a playtest in exhibition-making — a curatorial gameboard that unfolds over ten days through ten works. Each day activates a new state, whether emotional (vulnerability, anxiety, hope, reverie) or structural/mental (belief, speculation, conjecture, adaptivity, resilience, care). Together, they create a shifting map where artworks are not static objects but move in play, growing with each day and transforming the rhythm of the exhibition. Visitors are invited to explore this evolving field, examining how feelings and processes interact and how, in turn, we influence the rules of the game.
The first iteration, presented in 2015 at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, was conceived as an institute-as-arena for cultural reflexes — a lens to observe how we perform, negotiate, and perceive cultural matters.
Thukral and Tagra stage new situations by drawing on strategies of relational art: a participatory format of public engagement. Within this space, viewers are invited to bring forth their hate and transform it into acts of care. The familiar game of ping pong is transformed from a pastime of competition to a site of reflection. Another work, ‘Assets and Liabilities’, reconfigures demonetised Indian currency into the surface of a table-tennis table, inviting viewers to play across the residues of a disrupted economy. Here, the Game of Table Tennis becomes a metaphor for life and death, lullaby and lament.
Thinking through Eric Berne’s 1964 book of the same name, Games People Play, extends the idea of unconscious patterns of behaviour, roles, and strategies that shape human interactions. In Berne’s terms, these “games” are the subtle, often repetitive scripts people perform in order to negotiate power, attention, intimacy, or survival. Transposed into an artistic context, the phrase becomes a foundation to examine how such invisible rules play out across cultural, social, and emotional terrains — where performance, vulnerability, and resilience intertwine.
Audio Guide ＿Walkthrough: https://gamespeopleplay.andarchive.in/