Last updated on September 23rd, 2025 at 12:09 am
Stone Portraits Brings Marble, Memory & Craft To Ahmedabad
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StoneX Stone Portraits arrives in Ahmedabad: A Multisensory Celebration of Marble, Memory & Craft
StoneX, globally recognised as a custodian of the world’s finest stones, presents the next chapter of Stone Portraits in Ahmedabad – an immersive evening where stone, story, and senses converge. The event held on 19th–20th September 2025 at the Urmila Kailash Black Box, Kanoria Centre for Arts, offering guests an unforgettable multisensory encounter with one of India’s most enduring art forms.
Ms Prachi Bhattacharya, CEO of StoneX Art, said that “StoneX Art is a brand that deals in natural stone, marble, granite, onyx, limestone and semi-precious stones, sourced globally and processed in its own facilities.” This gives them control over quality and also allows artists to work with rare or unique slabs. The “Stone Portraits” series has taken place before in cities like Bangalore and Chennai; in Chennai, it was held under a banyan tree at Cholamandalam Artists’ Village, combining local art, culture and stone-making traditions. The Urmila Kailash Black Box, Kanoria Centre for Arts, is a known venue in Ahmedabad for contemporary arts performances and installations. Hosting it there connects the show to a local arts ecosystem. (General knowledge; multiple similar events use that space.)
When Newz Daddy’s chief editor asked Ms. Prachi Bhattacharya about the logic behind offering chocolates along with the display of the marble, she explained that StoneX Art wants to give people the flavour of the province from where the marble comes. That is why they offer chocolates made with ingredients from that province. It’s a nice way of narrating the story of the province while offering chocolate.
Following acclaimed showcases in Bangalore and Chennai, Stone Portraits now journeys to Ahmedabad, a city where heritage, craft, and contemporary art continually intersect. Guests will step into an evocative world where material becomes memory, tracing the origins of stone through culture, cuisine, music, and storytelling.
Ahmedabad has a long history of stone architecture, stepwells, pol forts, and the components of its old city use stone heavily. This makes the audience more likely to feel a deep connection to a stone-art event. (Cultural/architectural history of Ahmedabad and Gujarat) Multisensory art experiences are growing in India, combining not just sight but sound, smell, touch, and taste; they help people engage more deeply. This kind of format aligns with global trends in experiential art.
At the heart of the Ahmedabad edition is ‘I am Cotton’, a new installation by Shaik, a sculptor whose practice redefines the relationship between labour, material, and form. Shaik is a sculptor based in Gujarat (Ahmedabad area) who often uses minimal form, geometry and observations of daily life in his work. Carrara marble, used in the installation, is renowned for its purity, whiteness, and legacy in Italian sculpture, particularly in Renaissance works. It is valued for its translucence and fine grain, which allow fine detail and polish. Using it for something that looks soft, like cotton, adds a strong contrast.
“With each edition of Stone Portraits, we seek to situate stone within new cultural geographies, reminding us that its presence is both timeless and deeply local. Ahmedabad, with its enduring architectural heritage and living traditions of craft, provides a resonant setting for this dialogue. Here, we are honoured to foreground the artistry of regional artisans alongside contemporary practice, reaffirming our commitment to celebrating stone as both material and memory,” said Mr Sushant Pathak, Chief Marketing Officer, StoneX Global.
StoneX Global has a website (stonexglobal.com) that highlights its mission as “Elevating the Value of Natural Stone.” Sushant Pathak has spoken in other contexts about connecting stone to heritage and craft, especially in Rajasthan’s marble belt (e.g. Kishangarh) and fostering artisan communities.
‘I am Cotton’ presents a compelling contradiction, the translation of ephemeral fibre into enduring stone. Shaik sculpts Carrara Extra marble, historically the medium of Renaissance purity and modernist formalism, into voluminous forms resembling hand-picked cotton bales or pods. The surface is worked to retain organic irregularities, evoking a sense of softness, weightlessness, and even breath. Yet the irony is structural, the tactile illusion is carved, not grown; the softness is a fiction embedded in tonnage. The piece becomes a postcolonial meditation on material labour, commodity circulation, and the aesthetics of touch. It recalls Rachel Whiteread’s negative spaces and Doris Salcedo’s memory objects, invoking absence through presence. Positioned as both offering and obstruction, I am Cotton demands slowness and invites haptic imagination.
Rachel Whiteread and Doris Salcedo are internationally known for exploring memory, absence, and negative space, often via objects and materials that hold emotional weight. Whiteread’s work often casts or records negative space; Salcedo’s works are often in response to trauma or collective memory. Their mention helps place Shaik’s work in a lineage. Cotton as a commodity has a colonial history in India — cotton plantations, colonial export, and labour practices. Translating cotton into stone evokes those histories. The term “postcolonial” here relates to how materials, trade, and labour have been shaped by colonial histories.
Every sense will be awakened:
Sight: immersive worlds narrating the provenance of stone.
Touch: the raw beauty of the land resting in your palm.
Sound: music echoing the cultural heartbeat of the region.
Taste: flavours that carry a memory home.
Provenance of stone means not just where the marble came from (quarries, specific regions) but also how it was mined, transported, and cared for. Knowing provenance is increasingly valued in art and design. Using taste (local food) in an art event ties the sensory memory of place, making the event feel rooted. Ahmedabad is known for rich cuisine (street food, sweets, etc.), so that dimension can be strong. The sound component might draw on local folk music, Gujarati traditional music, echo patterns or acoustic qualities of stone spaces (temples, stepwells).
Honouring a Lineage of Master Artisans The artisans engaged in Stone Portraits hail from the border districts between Rajasthan and Gujarat – a region historically renowned for its sophisticated stone-working traditions. Belonging to the third generation of practitioners, they inherit a lineage deeply embedded in the material culture of Western India. Rajasthan, especially around Kishangarh, and parts of Gujarat have been centres of marble quarrying and stone carving for centuries. Makrana marble is very famous; many temples and historic structures in northern India use marble from these regions. The skills (chiselling, carving) are often passed down families for generations; tools are traditional (chisels, hammers, abrasives), and the precision of shaping marble is high.
Singularly dedicated to marble – the stone of temples, forts, and Mughal masterpieces – their practice rejects other substrates in favour of chiselling and carving techniques that demand both physical precision and aesthetic sensitivity. The works they create embody the continuity of centuries-old artisanal knowledge, while opening themselves to contemporary modes of exhibition and dialogue.
Marble was used in Mughal buildings (e.g. Taj Mahal) and in temples in India; it symbolises purity, durability, and light reflection. Carving marble is harder than many softer stones; the dust, labour, and polishing are more involved. Their opening to contemporary exhibition means showing stone art in galleries, art festivals, and public installations, combining with modern ideas (like multisensory, immersive art) rather than traditional religious or architectural uses.
More than an exhibition, Stone Portraits is an experiential journey. Guests will not just see the stones; they will taste the air of their homeland, feel their textures in their palms, hear the echoes of their culture, and step into worlds shaped by their history. Experiential art journeys like this often leave visitors with lasting memory and sometimes reflection on identity, culture, heritage, and labour. This is not just entertainment but provokes thinking. In India, there is a rising interest in these forms of art that connect people to land, to craft, to ecological and historical concerns. Stone, being durable, becomes a way to talk about time, change, and memory.
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