Across London and New York, Sumayya Vally and Somnath Bhatt begin the year in dialogue, reflecting on Bhatt’s recent solo exhibition છાયારાષ્ટ્ર / Republic of Shadows.

They speak about images that precede language, on meaning as something never fully held, and on the act of bringing other worlds into being through one’s own sensibilities. The conversation turns to dreaming in a moment when hope feels distant—toward imagination not as escape, but as mode of attunement—and toward what it means to make, attentively and insistently, in the present.

Bhatt traces the exhibition’s origins to archaeology, pixels, and the layered temporalities of sites such as Mohenjodaro and the Ajanta Caves. Fragments, for him, are not evidence of loss but generative openings. Pixels become contemporary sand. Noise and signal coexist. Meaning shifts with position.

Vally responds through architecture, reflecting on hybridity, transference, and the need to protect instinctive images from over-definition. Rather than conclusions, the conversation offers conditions: for listening, for layering, and for imagining beyond the constraints of the present.