Ayan Mukherjee’s latest exhibition questions connection in a screen-bound reality

In an age where presence is increasingly mediated through screens, Digital Atma X The Wandering Souls arrives as both mirror and meditation. Conceived and curated by artist Ayan Mukherjee, the exhibition at AM Studio, Kolkata unfolds as a layered enquiry into the erosion – and reconfiguration of human connection in digital times.

At its core lies a haunting proposition: what happens when the body persists, but the soul drifts into an infinite virtual expanse? Ayan frames it starkly – “the body remains while the soul perishes somewhere in an infinite digital space, wandering in search of its real-life identity and essence.” It is this tension between presence and absence that shapes the exhibition’s emotional landscape.

Built through a collaborative dialogue with artists including Paul Holmes, Rajib Chowdhury, Rounak Patra, Smarak Roy and Ushnish Mukhopadhyay, alongside a layered soundscape by Sayantan Dasgupta, the show constructs an immersive environment where the physical and virtual bleed into one another. Fragmented visuals, ambient echoes and spatial dissonance mirror the curator’s own poetic language. “I see you in fragments, far outside you… souls tossed, bodies turn phantoms,” he writes, capturing a sense of dislocation that feels eerily familiar.

Yet, the exhibition resists a simplistic critique of technology. Instead, it poses uncomfortable questions about complicity and control. As Ayan notes, we may be “slowly surrendering agency to the very systems we occupy,” even as they promise connection. In this shifting paradigm, intimacy is recalibrated – conversations become typed exchanges, emotions are mediated, and the “cold touch of a keyboard” replaces the warmth of human contact.

Still, there is no didactic conclusion. “I approach this project not as a resolution, but as a space of questioning,” the curator reflects. Viewers are invited to move through uncertainty, to confront their own digital selves and the silences they inhabit.

On view till April 25, the exhibition lingers beyond the gallery, as a reminder that somewhere between being alive and truly living, touch may have quietly slipped away.