Please Touch Gently

(zines, comics, ephemera)

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Saket New Delhi

1 April - 30 Nov

Image credits: KNMA and Namrata Dhall

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) celebrated the fifth exhibition in its ‘Young Artists of Our Time’ series with Please Touch Gently. The title itself immediately raises questions about the nature of the exhibition. In most museums and galleries, visitors are conditioned to look without touching. Please Touch Gently challenged this familiar rule and invited visitors to become participants rather than passive viewers.

The exhibition brought together works by thousands of zinesters, comic artists, illustrators, and independent publishers working across 22 languages. Visitors were encouraged to handle, browse, and explore the material freely, and after the exhibition concluded, the collection was integrated into KNMA’s library. Through this expansive gathering of zines, comics, and self- published works, the exhibition examined contemporary print cultures in India and the worlds of independent publishing and small presses coming together.

What made the exhibition especially striking was its refusal to place these materials behind glass or treat them as distant artefacts. Instead, it approached zines and comics as living, circulating forms of culture. Curatorial Advisor Akansha Rastogi envisioned the exhibition in a way that resisted “museumising” this evolving practice. The exhibition also brought together distinct curatorial perspectives through the contributions of Himanshu S, Bharath Murthy, and aqui Thami, each engaging with different histories, aesthetics, and possibilities within comics, zines, and independent print cultures. Rather than guiding visitors through a fixed narrative, the exhibition unfolded differently for each person, shaped through browsing, handling, and discovery at one’s own pace.

EXHIBITIONS WE LOVED

Zines have long existed outside conventional publishing structures. Often associated with self-publishing, they have also functioned as spaces of protest, experimentation, and immediacy — forms through which people publish without waiting for institutional approval.

Comics and zines alike offer makers greater control over how ideas, memories, and political thoughts are circulated. In a similar way, the exhibition gave visitors agency over how they experienced the space, allowing interaction, movement, and participation to shape their encounter with the works.

More than simply displaying material, Please Touch Gently created an environment where visitors could engage directly with print culture as something tactile, collaborative, and continually in motion.

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