Mario d'Souza

Home Away From Home, Le Geste Juste

Rebecca KAEPPNER — 2026-03-17T11:45:20Z

"Home Away From Home, Le Geste Juste"

Mario D'Souza (born 1973, Bangalore) lives and works between India and Paris. Presented at the Alliance Française de Delhi in March 2026, Home Away From Home, le geste juste explores the idea of the “right gesture” : the moment when thought becomes action and an idea takes material form.

In D'Souza's practice, gesture is both a means of making and a way of thinking. Sewing, stitching, and embroidery become acts of reflection carried out through the hand, drawing upon long traditions of craftsmanship and transmission. The needle becomes a tool of discovery, through which simple forms—stars, flowers, constellations—gradually emerge.

For the first time, the artist has invited artisans to embroider his drawings. This shift from line to stitch marks an important evolution in his work. The drawing is no longer solely the artist's gesture but the result of collaboration, where craftsmanship is not a technical step but an essential dimension of the work itself.
Working slowly through repetition and attention to detail, D'Souza allows imperfections to remain visible. These marks become traces of time, labour, and presence. In this sense, the “right gesture” is not the perfect one, but the one that remains faithful to its origin.

The installation conceived for the Alliance Française introduces a new sense of verticality. Suspended works invite viewers to move through the space, encountering a field of forms, materials, and gestures rather than simply observing images.

Shaped by the artist's life between France and India, the work brings together different textile traditions—from French Toile de Jouy to Indian silk. Ultimately, the exhibition reflects on the idea of belonging : home not as a place, but as a state of openness. Creation begins with a simple gesture—a thread passing through fabric—from which form, and gradually a world, emerges.

Drawings of Albert Durer

Rebecca KAEPPNER — 2025-10-06T10:33:19Z

Home away from home

Rebecca KAEPPNER — 2025-10-06T10:26:26Z

‘Home away from Home'

For over two decades, creating a ‘home away from home' has been my mantra and daily practice. Being Indian-French and someone who melts two very distinct cultural identities, I am acutely aware of interpersonal and societal separations that arise due to differences in culture. With this background, creating a ‘home away from home' wherever I travel has become an all-embracing allegory for transforming divergence into convergence, be it at the level of speech, art, communication, self-development, community, rituals, or conversations with people across the globe.

As an artist who fosters space for artisans by deliberately showcasing hand-made products, I focus on the biodynamism of nature and life and use art and as well as my hybrid background as a message and pathway to deliver and awaken awareness of thought, spiritual principles, multiculturalism, migration, identity, and self-exploration. As I interact with local artisans, collect discarded objects, and dive into everyday life, I create art through community engagement. I focus on comfort, both inside of myself and in with my surroundings. In order to cultivate this inner and outer dialogue, I accompany my concepts by offering artist talks and interactions through workshops in galleries, prisons, schools, hospitals and museums. This way, my message becomes relatable and alive for my audience.

There are several elements and mediums that I use to represent the core of my beliefs, and which I bring as common thread to all my art. Through the prism of art, these mediums have become the metaphors of my message. One of these is hands : they represent the screen through which I see life. Hands and their function in someone's life reflects their psychology and inner attitude. Whether we see hands that work, dig and plant in the Earth, hands in rituals, or hands in movement ; the hands bring the inner essence to work. They are the fabric of human labor.

Another medium and physical element of my work that holds a strong metaphor is a chair. In its symbolism it represents a voting right, a voice, comfort, finding space, and power. As such, it captures a wide range of meaning ; for example someone can offer me a chair, or I can take a chair. A king sits higher than his subjects- his chair is a throne. In other cultures, people sit on the floor and not on chairs. Each scenario is different in its dynamic and context within which it takes place.

The recurring element that I find myself exploring with oftentimes is color as well as texture. I find that these two elements add identity. I draw on color paper and I seek color in my life, both physically and metaphorically. Growing up, I was taught to cherish color. My family treasures a collection of sarees that have been passed down through generations, each one more beautiful, vibrant, and colorful than the next. Furthermore, the form of a cloth can be in various states ; it can be folded and thereby occupy less space, or it can be widely spread out.

Observing how these elements embedded in their cultural symbolism are routinely used and expressed by the people I interact with, has guided me and become the substance of inspiration for my philosophy and in the creation of my artwork. At the source, becoming enveloped in culture and a part of people's experience is what I seek to share and portray in my art and is also what depicts the core of my swaddharma : ‘home away from home'.

Jaipur

Rebecca KAEPPNER — 2025-10-06T10:16:18Z

Home away from home

Rebecca KAEPPNER — 2025-10-06T10:12:35Z

Kochi Biennale

A place at the place

There are several elements and mediums that I use to represent the core of my beliefs, and which I bring as a common thread to all my art. Through the prism of art, these mediums have become metaphors for my message. One of these is my hands : they represent the screen through which I see life. Hands and their function in someone's life reflect their psychology and inner attitude. Whether we see hands that work, dig and plant on the Earth, hands in rituals, or hands in movement ; the hands bring the inner essence to work. They are the fabric of human labour.
The recurring element that I find myself exploring oftentimes is colour, also texture ; these two elements add identity. Observing how these elements embedded in their cultural symbolism are routinely used and expressed by the people I interact with, has guided me and become the substance of inspiration for my philosophy and in the creation of my artwork. At the source, becoming enveloped in culture and a part of people's experience is what I seek to share and portray in my art and is also what depicts the core of my swadharma, Home away from home.

Home away from Home

Organic indigo ink, varied dimensions Site-specific

This is a story to understand the essence of one's identity, a combination of the self with the other, which deals with compromise and adaption, a journey of changing one's home, stretching it to feel at home in that given, chosen space, the idea of movement, torment seen through colour and food. During this process of adaptation, new languages and new rituals are learnt, and new flavours are discovered. Years of learning and unlearning finally allow comfort. Life slowly becomes a composition of work and encounters, created through sharing, and understanding the dilemma of moving, of change, from one home to another.

For over two decades, creating a Home away from Home has been my mantra and daily practice. Being Indian-French and someone who melts two very distinct cultural identities, I am acutely sensitive to interpersonal and societal separations that arise due to differences in cultures and backgrounds. This becomes the backdrop in creating a Home away from home.

Alliance Française Trivandrum

Rebecca KAEPPNER — 2025-10-05T22:50:30Z

Kanoria Centre for Arts

Rebecca KAEPPNER — 2025-10-05T22:45:56Z

Kanoria Centre for Arts

Mario has been living in France for the past 23 years and is back in India for a short period, continuing to work as an artist. This installation speaks about the composition of cut flowers to celebrate, integrate, collaborate and curate a cultural high breed ! To help understand these cut emotions, Mario has recomposed them in the Kanoria Museum space. Metaphorically the flowers he has painted are transported from one region to another, before they reach the vase - a parable to his present life and journey. Symbolised by wall drawings, the indigo colour represents his identity and the installation is a metaphor to the everyday celebration of his life !

Home away from home

Rebecca KAEPPNER — 2025-10-05T22:35:34Z

Faisant suite à la résidence de Mario D'Souza et aux moments partagés avec les résidents et l'équipe, Home Away from Home se déploie pour quelques mois dans les espaces de la Maison nationale des Artistes.

Home Away from Home est plus qu'une exposition, c'est une expérience dans laquelle Mario « habite » l'espace. Il prend possession de la Maison qui, à son contact, se transforme, se décore, s'habille et retrouve une dimension personnelle et domestique. Le grand salon, la galerie, deviennent ainsi des lieux de l'intime, ceux dans lesquels Mario D'Souza dévoile son univers : les maisons où il a vécu, en Inde ou, ici en France, en région Centre Val-de-France, sa famille, les objets qu'il met en scène dans ses intérieurs…

On y découvre Mario D'Souza dans son quotidien au sein de son appartement parisien, on le voit travailler, déambuler au sein d'un espace où l'on retrouve des caractéristiques similaires à celles qui s'expriment à la Maison nationale des artistes : l'exubérance et la profusion des motifs, la combinaison de couleurs et de textures variées, des bibelots d'époques et de genres divers, des objets du quotidien qui deviennent sculptures par le geste de Mario, des dessins peints directement sur les murs, des cadres, des tissus… Il en résulte un univers bigarré et joyeux qui appelle au jeu et au déplacement.

Cette problématique du déplacement est justement part intégrante du travail et permet d'appréhender l'œuvre de l'artiste : le déplacement est, avant tout, le sien, celui d'un déplacement entre des pays, entre des langues, entre des cultures, entre des motifs et ornementations, entre des gestes et pratiques culturelles différents. Si ce déplacement apparaît comme rupture, celles présentes sur les toiles de l'exposition, cet « entre deux » est justement l'élément qui permet de réunir, d'assurer la connexion entre ces deux espaces du dessin mais plus globalement entre ces deux endroits où se situe Mario D'Souza en permanence. Le blanc permet ainsi la matérialisation de cet espace vierge dans et avec lequel Mario D'Souza a construit une identité nouvelle à la convergence de toutes ces influences. Le travail est ainsi celui du syncrétisme, celui qui permet à l'artiste d'être chez soi ailleurs et d'être toujours soi ailleurs.

Home away from home

Rebecca KAEPPNER — 2025-10-05T22:26:31Z

Forever Young

Let's dance in style, let's dance for a while
Heaven can wait, we're only watching the skies
Hoping for the best, but expecting the worst
Are you gonna drop the bomb or not ?
Alphaville, Forever Young, 1984

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the opening of MAC VAL, the “Forever Young” exhibition looks to the future : it brings together twenty young artists for whom the encounter with MAC VAL was a pivotal moment, a turning point in their artistic careers. Perhaps the key words of this project are “frequentation” and “companionship.” Indeed, they grew up near and with MAC VAL. They have frequented its spaces and gardens ever since they were children. As neighbours. Here they played, learned, discovered art, set their hearts on being artists, watched and dreamed. They visited the exhibitions with their family, on their own or with their school (from nursery school to art school). They have taken part in art workshops, and sometimes led them.

They have visited exhibitions, and sometimes even hung them.

To prepare for this retrospective and prospective exhibition, I spoke to colleagues, to various partners, and to artists teaching in art schools and, at the end of these informal interviews, I selected twenty artists who were born between 1973 and 1997.

This exhibition makes no claim to be exhaustive or neutral. It makes no attempt to paint a generational portrait. This exhibition bears witness to the diversity of backgrounds and attitudes, and to the richness of the so-called emerging scene, in a museum that is twenty years old. If the link forged with the MAC VAL is the smallest common denominator between these artists, their practices and works are all rooted, in singular and situated ways, in a reflection of and on reality, echoing the echoes of the world.

The exhibition sequence is built on associations of ideas, one leading to or guiding another.
There's pink, lots of pink. There are ghosts, lots of ghosts. Coloured lipsticks, luminous events, encapsulated scooters and toothpaste, empowered self-portraits, images and more images, machines of all kinds (for photographing, travelling in time and space, dreaming, disappearing), speculative narration, science fiction, Vitryan façades, evocations, a generational vessel, energies channelled or not, a castle on the verge of collapse and the odour of apocalypse, cocoons and an almost forgotten language, painted bodies, slogans and sentences, a space in waiting, folded fabrics and colour, concrete and questioned standards, stones and a love story, a sleeping lover and oracles, landscapes passed through, places filled with memories. Twenty singular universes as alternative ways of inhabiting the world.

We are greeted by an ironic Coco de RineZ's, made up like Marilyn Monroe as seen by Warhol. This image is part of a series of joyful, empowered self-portraits in which the artist mischievously embodies a variety of personalities and iconic figures. Alternately Angela Davis and Michel Polnareff, Snow White and Bob Marley, Coco de RineZ jubilantly embarks on an enterprise of self (de)construction via a strategy of infiltrating representations.

Further in, Aïda Bruyère continues her analysis of mainstream aesthetics. With Red Lipstick Monsterz, she develops the artillery of an uncompromising mass feminism. Stiletto heels, sharp nails, make-up, glitter, night clubs and femmes fatales – a true warrior against gendered violence, she appropriates and turns the weapons of so-called feminine seduction against themselves.
Chadine Amghar's dual culture has given her a taste for composites. She assembles elements with strong connotations, borrowed from urban and suburban landscapes (scooters, cinder blocks, anti-pigeon devices) in modular sculptural arrangements. Whether she's taking a sexist everyday object and turning it inside out as a tribute to women agitators the world over, varnishing baguettes, packing breezeblocks in TATI bags, or invoking the figure of the pigeon or the motif of the watermelon, everything about her work is a sign, a meaning, in a broad layering of metaphors and reflections on cultural identities, globalisation and the circulation of goods and bodies.
Exuberant and lustful, flamboyant and angry : such is the world of Jordan Roger. Breaking with the religious conservatism of his biological family, he digs deeper and expands his elective family. An eschatological pantheon in which fairies, aliens, mermaids and other drag creatures all cohabit. Working towards the collapse of retrograde powers, his acidic, glossy, conspicuously handmade works aspire to dance on the ruins of an oppressive world and offer a completely different vision of the apocalypse.

Over the last few years, Rebecca Topakian has been (re)appropriating her family history. Born into the Armenian diaspora, she set off with her camera to discover the country and culture of her ancestors. Starting with the romantic love story of her grandparents, she uses her photographs to sketch a landscape beyond the stories, projections and fantasies of a geographical and cultural territory, in search of her own identity.

Over the last few years Mario D'Souza has conducted his experiments under the umbrella title of Home Away From Home. His environments evoke the question of “home” with fragility and impermanence. Ornamental, decorative, baroque and conceptual, he arranges spaces that are enveloping and welcoming. Fabrics folded, others spread out, colours painted, drawings laid down evoke the fluidity of identities. The in-between. Articulating an intra-cultural dialogue, between France and India, he is at home everywhere and nowhere, nowhere and everywhere.
Appearance and presence are the keywords in Camille Brée's work. Her vaporous art keeps us in a state of alertness and vigilance. Something is happening. Or will happen. Or has already happened. Light, smoke, interstices, and the infra-thin interrogate the conditions of the visible and shift our gaze and attention. Here, a vanishing box, an essential accessory in any conjuring act, is on display, open and offered up to us. Everything is in plain sight, but the mystery remains intact.
Tarmac, pre-paid phones, cobbled-together seats, cement, Caprisun, football shirts and Nike Air Max TNs, plastic film and synthetic lace ; cobbled-together, displaced, transparent, superimposed and horizontal. Maïlys Lamotte-Paulet's installations nonchalantly propose spaces in waiting. In-between places. Suspended times. Thresholds. Spaces of projection. Something is imminent. We're on the edge. It's coming for us.

Raphaël Maman's visual gestures and operations use construction materials and literally give body to the norm, making standards visible, revealing their logic, taming them the better to contradict them. And they propose alternative scenarios for occupying the world. Here, an installation that literally materialises the link between construction standards and body weight ; elsewhere, furniture set in a slab of reinforced concrete provides a table to be occupied by a new kind of feast.
Decorative overload, hypertrophy of the body, saturation of colour – everything about Richard Otparlic's work articulates a queer, camp aesthetic that combines elements from both popular and scholarly cultures, from Instagram to the Louvre, from the Kardashian family to Leonardo da Vinci. Otparlic's practice plays on contrasts (pretty colours vs. the hypersexualisation of figures, etc.) to develop a tender, dreamlike, sharp, saturated universe, full of icons and mythological figures, between assumed naivety, a critical stance and playful joy in which non-hegemonic masculinities frolic.

In Yann Estève's environments, memories, fleeting moments, sensations and reminiscences are organised in arrangements that are endlessly played out and replayed in dialogue with the places that host them. Ready-mades, recuperated objects, photographs and drawings combine to evoke the unstable layerings of the theatres of memory.

Emma Cossée Cruz's Théâtre des Machines reflects on the making of images, their substance and weight, and the actual act of making an image. Photographs of medical imaging machines (linked to both the arms and health industries, these machines are used to control and normalise bodies) are transferred onto standardised sheets of plasterboard in a gesture reminiscent of the velvety art of fresco. Distributed across the space in a sort of danse macabre, they come face-to-face (or body-to-body ?) with visitors.

Language and its structures, verbal and non-verbal communication between beings, truth and fiction, documentary and metaphor, codes, individuals, history and its writing, the trace, the residue –these are all areas of questioning at work in Garush Melkonyan's work. What is an image ? How is it made ? What does it contain ?

Sculptures with oblong, quasi-organic shapes, looking like cocoons and other envelopes, that seem to have come straight out of science-fiction films such as Alien and The Matrix. Or perhaps they're caskets encapsulating precious relics. Or simply lamps. Or maybe all of the above. And/and : it is in this movement that Kim Farkas questions his genealogy, at the intersection of several diasporas. The speculative materiality of these sculptures is matched by the ghostly evanescence of a spectral video immortalising the almost lost tradition of improvised sung poetry in the language of the Peranakans.

It looks like a rocket, a shuttle, a giant insect, a kind of generator, a new-generation sound system : this sculpture with Cronenbergian overtones takes us into a speculative dystopia. In it, Hugo Vessiler-Fonfreide continues his exploration of energy issues : energy, its production, its circulation, its mythologies, its promises and its dead ends. In this generational vessel, organs and machinery mingle. This pseudo-cyborg construction will be activated several times during the exhibition by the artist and his acolytes for electrified and electrifying musical performances.
In her immersive installations, Sarah-Anais Desbenoit invites us to be contemplative and slow down. Here reality is reconstructed as an architectural tale, looped and bodiless, borrowing from the world of model making, dioramas and fairgrounds. Strongly melancholic and cinematographic, her immobile crossings of urban landscapes reveal the invisible structures and mechanisms that set the pace of our daily lives, and the behaviours and affects generated by our ways of dwelling.
The landscapes of Vitry (from the Dalle Robespierre to the 183 bus) form the matrix for the work of the Commaret siblings. Grichka paints and Tohé films and photographs. Grichka's small, airbrushed paintings and Tohé's still and moving images evoke intimate memories, offering visions of a city rebuilt by memory and affection we feel for the places where we grew up. And the people who live there.

Lassana Sarre paints. He brings his body and his subjectivity as a black person to a reworking of the heritage of French-style painting. He takes an official history and turns it on its head, injecting a healthy dose of autobiography. Vitry-sur-Seine is the backdrop for his pictorial machines, where, in dialogue with Manet or Géricault, the non-finito and suspense both come to the fore.
Language situations are the raw material of Loreto Martinez Troncoso's explorations. It's a question of giving a voice or speaking out, of making reality resonate (ratiocinate ?) by putting voices, our voices, to the test. The voice as synecdoche of the body, of bodies. Speech as an event that is always already situated. With Julie Pellegrin, her accomplice and friend of twenty years, they will close the exhibition on 4 January 2026 with a conversation that is part of their practice of long-term exchange.

Continuing in this vein of friendship and closeness, and because the present is full of our ghosts, I felt it was important to pay tribute to Merhyl Ferri Levisse. He was an artist, a fellow museum member and a friend who died in 2023. Starting with our first encounter in 2015, following his visit to the “Chercher le garçon” exhibition, we entered into an artistic dialogue that, over the years, had become friendly, regular and sometimes contradictory. The conversation continues, in a different way.

Curated by Frank Lamy assisted by Julien Blanpied

The Sculpture Park at Madhavendra Palace

Rebecca KAEPPNER — 2025-10-05T22:10:50Z

The Sculpture Park at Madhavendra Palace

The Saat Saath Arts Foundation, in collaboration with the Government of Rajasthan, is proud to present the Third Edition of the Sculpture Park at Madhavendra Palace.

Curated by Peter Nagy, the exhibition presented the works of fourteen artists within the courtyard and apartments of the 19th Century Palace. A roster of international and Indian artists presented works which challenge our conceptions of what sculpture is, moving away from conventions and exploring a wide variety of materials, subjects, and approaches.

Nine artists (Anastasio, Fonteles, Khosla, Kumar, Mocelin & Pellegrini, Noureldin, Pasolini, Xavier) created new site-specific works inspired by and responding to the architecture of the palace and the context of Jaipur. The remaining five artists chose works to display within the elaborately decorated spaces of the palace to bring new perspectives to their creations, which were most usually displayed in the white box spaces of museums and art galleries.

In all cases, a dialogue was created between a historical structure, being its own hybridized confection, and contemporary art ; enriching the experiences of all visitors to Nahargarh Fort while promoting the reinvigoration of India's heritage culture.

Curated by Peter Nagy