20 September,2026 11:26 AM IST | Mumbai | Junisha Dama
Mars and Jupiter
What if a forest could hold a story? Not just one, but fragments of folklore, childhood memories, family, and animals. In artist Priyanka Aelay's latest works, the forest becomes just such a place. It's abundant, dense, colourful, and seemingly endless.
Aelay's solo exhibition, It Will Rain Again When We Meet, is currently on view at KYNKYNY in Kala Ghoda. It draws from her long engagement with flora and fauna, as well as years of research into the folk stories of South India.
"Most of the stories that dated back always happened inside the forest or inside a cave that was put inside a forest," says Aelay, who has spent the last four to five years researching folk narratives.
To Pull Me Back to the Ground Again
Her paintings translate these oral traditions into visual worlds, but without making the references immediately obvious. "Unless somebody talks to me, they would not know that there is a folk story happening in the world," she says.
Rather than recreating folklore literally, Aelay wants the landscapes to remain open to interpretation. "I like the work to be more universal where anybody from any part of the world can relate to it."
The animals that inhabit these forests have their own stories. Tigers appeared prominently in her earlier work, partly influenced by her father's research into caste mythology, where the tiger appears as a vehicle for a community. In recent years, her attention has shifted to deer and, more recently, foxes.
The Forever Gaze
The familiar image of the fox as a cunning, manipulative creature, however, is not the one Aelay is interested in. She is looking instead at their softer side, and how foxes behave around their families and partners.
There is also a personal urgency to the abundance of her landscapes. Aelay grew up surrounded by trees, only to watch them disappear as the city changed. "As a kid, I grew up in a community and it was filled with trees. But as I kept growing, then you know they were all cut off for the car parking."
Her forests are therefore less documentary than imaginative. They are places one can mentally escape into. "The medium allows me to create an imaginative landscape where one is just driving, like, you know, the density of the image probably pulls you in."
That sense of infinity extends to her use of circular canvases. For Aelay, the circle has no hard borders, much like the moon and the limitless worlds it evokes. "For me, the circular fits better for my work because it's also something that is subject to the moon." The landscape could be above the sea or below it; in the sky or somewhere imagined.
Ultimately, though, these paintings are about storytelling and the way stories travel. "The whole world runs on storytelling. That's how I see the world," Aelay says. Like the folk tales passed down by grandparents and carried forward through generations, she sees painting as another way of keeping a story alive.
WHAT: It will rain again when we meet - solo exhibition by Priyanka Aelay
WHERE: KYNKYNY, 4th Floor, 20, Gool Mansion, Homji Street, Kala Ghoda, Fort, Mumbai
WHEN: September 9 to October 1; Monday to Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm
