The catalogue of the 16th Krishnakriti Festival, curated by Abeer Gupta, Director of Krishnakriti Foundation. The festival theme explored the city as archive — examining how visual practices document, transform, and reimagine urban space. The publication documents the exhibitions, film screenings, and seminars of the festival, and provides a curatorial framework for future editions. It is not merely a record of events but a critical argument about the relationship between visual culture, cities, and memory.

Approximately 50 photographs and maps from the Kalakriti Archives appear alongside contemporary images of Hyderabad in this publication that offers a tri-perspective of the city — a recent glorious past, an ever-changing present, and visions of the future. The book accompanied the exhibition curated for the Agora Biennale of Architecture, Urbanism and Design in Bordeaux, France in September 2017. A seamless thread of visual history weaves the narrative from late 19th-century maps and photographs through to the present day, including a ‘before and after’ section where contemporary photographers step into the perspectives of earlier photographers such as Lala Deen Dayal.

A compelling and lucid history of Secunderabad’s growth from a British cantonment to an English town — tracing the founding of a new fort, a high-security prison, an Anglo-Indian township called Little England, and the city’s eventual evolution into what it is today. While Hyderabad was founded on love, the book argues that Secunderabad was an offspring of coercive diplomacy. Lavishly illustrated with vintage photographs from the Kalakriti Archives, it is an essential resource for anyone interested in the history of the Deccan and the twin cities.

A career-spanning publication on Hyderabad-based artist Surya Prakash, whose practice spans nearly six decades. The book accompanied the Surya Prakash Retrospective held at Kalakriti Art Gallery between July 28 and August 27, 2017. A long-form critical essay accompanies pictures of Surya’s work across all periods — tracing his surreal, impressionist, yet always resolute vision across several layers of spectacular pigment and imagination, and examining his contribution to the unfolding of certain tendencies in Indian art across the decades.

Written by Vivek Nanda and Alexander Johnson — two of India’s foremost historians and curators of cartographic heritage — this landmark publication traces India’s cartographic traditions from medieval cosmological manuscripts and pre-survey painted maps through to the modern scientific cartography of the colonial era. Lavishly illustrated with high-quality reproductions, each map is separately analysed with its social, cultural, and political context. With the exception of two maps from the National Museum, all maps in the book are from the Prshant Lahoti Personal Collection at the Kalakriti Archives. Published in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture, Government of India — this is the definitive scholarly resource on Indian cartographic heritage.

A comprehensive record of the landmark retrospective of Jogen Chowdhury held at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad, between February 16 and March 20, 2016. The publication traces the artist’s journey from his early work in Calcutta in the 1950s through to his fully-formed oeuvre, exploring the unity of intention that runs across all periods of his practice. Features a reprint of K.G. Subramanyan’s celebrated essay on the artist, additional critical essays, an interview, and Jogen’s own words — preserving the intellectual energy of the exhibition in a volume of permanent scholarly value.