DR, TL:
Gallerist Mehak Bhan on why 105 Arts exists — a Chandigarh gallery founded in 2021 to document contemporary Indian art and champion emerging talent.
An art gallery is so much more than a space where an artist displays their creativity. It’s a timekeeper for the era. Contemporary artists, and the way they think, reflect the world they live in — and a gallery records that, documents it, with an audience standing witness.
A Gallery Widens How You See the World
Art, and the space that holds it, challenges the status quo. It lets you sit with someone else’s point of view, even when you don’t fully agree with it. In a healthy space, even disagreement is welcomed — you leave the room having thought differently, not just having looked at something pretty.
That’s the quiet work a gallery does that a living room wall never can. A painting on your wall reflects your taste. A painting in a gallery, seen alongside other work from the same moment in time, becomes part of a larger conversation — one that art historians, collectors, and curious visitors will look back on to understand what this era in Indian art actually looked like.
The Audience Is Part of the Story
For patrons — collectors and casual visitors alike — a gallery is a chance to support that creativity in real time. To witness it. To enjoy the journey, whether as a collector building something serious, or simply as someone looking on, unhurried, learning as they go.
This is precisely why a physical gallery still matters in a world of Instagram scrolls and online art marketplaces. A screen shows you a picture of a painting. A gallery lets you stand in front of the actual work, see its scale, its texture, the artist’s hand in it — and talk to the people who can tell you why it matters.
Why 105 Arts, and Why Chandigarh?
A world without art, without a gallery, would be like a party without music. When collector Mehak Bhan opened the green doors of 105 Arts to Chandigarh in 2021, it was built on exactly this idea — a space to foster young, emerging talent from the region, and to give the people of Chandigarh, Punjab, and its diaspora scattered across the world a place to experience Indian contemporary art at its finest.
Since then, 105 Arts has worked as both a launchpad and a bridge: a launchpad for artists from this region who might otherwise never get gallery representation, and a bridge for a city with deep pockets and deeper roots to finally invest that spending power in its own creative talent, not just in what’s already validated elsewhere.
Chandigarh Already Has the Best. Why Not Art Too?
Chandigarh already has some of the finest architecture, town planning, people, and aesthetic sensibility in the country — built, quite literally, by some of the most celebrated designers of the twentieth century. A city planned this thoughtfully deserves a contemporary art scene just as intentional.
That’s the gap 105 Arts exists to fill.
If you haven’t walked through the green doors yet, there’s no better time. Come see what this era of Indian contemporary art looks like, meet the artists shaping it, and decide for yourself what belongs on your walls — and in this city’s story.