Affinity in sociology is understood by an individual identifying with a subculture, ethnicity, or other groups, within a larger social structure. This instinctive force is often understood through collective and shared experiences, yet it continues to be discovered, questioned, feared, contested, and even rejected within personal spaces. While self-identification with a group is a valid form of expressing affinity, this is also often seen as a tendency to favour certain people, ideas, and objects evoking communitarianism over individualism. 

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Affinity here becomes a tool to create the conditions for connection without requiring sameness, a space where vulnerability becomes knowledge, and where shared experiences form the basis of solidarity. It acknowledges that stories exist in relation: to other bodies, other histories, other ecologies, resisting  the logic of uniformity imposed by dominant systems.

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Engaging with subjective affinities allows us to inquiry and negotiate between oneself and social structures. It examines the conditioning and stereotypes that shape us—formed through personal history, cultural exposure, social conditioning, memory, desire, and power structures. It acknowledges interdependence — between people, cultures, and ecologies. 

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Affinités / अपनापन  interrogates the cultural, political, and emotional forces that shape and complicate the notion of affinity through the works of artists from South Asia and its diaspora. Affinity begins from lived experience. From speaking in one’s own voice, without translation or justification. 

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We come to understand that affinities are not static; they evolve over time. They exist through continuous nurture and negotiation within the societies we inhabit. Across the artists’ individual inquiries, the exhibition creates a shared space of affinity—one that encourages learning, mutual respect, and collective care, pointing toward softer, more gentle futures in contrast to today’s world.