May Art And Culture Calendar: Every Exhibit, Live Performance, And Concert Worth Your Visit

As summer settles over the city, galleries, cultural centres, and performance spaces become meeting points. More often, so that you can stay in the cool, surrounded by art, ideas and conversations around it.

Moreover, you do not have to wait for the sun to set to enjoy your outings as these top art and culture events in the city are almost all day long.

From rare archival photographs of Satyajit Ray and documentary-style photography of a myriad crafts by Jyoti Bhatt to a tribute to legends with candlelight concerts, this month’s line-up has something for every art and culture enthusiast, spread across Delhi and Mumbai.

Faces and Facets: Satyajit Ray in Colour

There’s always a curiosity to know about the inspiring craft and life of the legends. This exhibition revisits the life and working world of iconic filmmaker Satyajit Ray through the extensive photographic archive of notable photographer Nemai Ghosh. Displayed at DAG, the archive documents Ray across film sets, personal moments, rehearsals, and creative discussions. Some photographs will be shown publicly for the first time, offering audiences a rare insight into one of Indian cinema’s most influential figures and Ray’s cinematic legacy

When: Till July 4

Where: DAG, 22A Windsor Place, Janpath, New Delhi

Craft, Community and Memory- Photographs by Jyoti Bhatt

Pioneering artist, printmaker, and photographer Jyoti Bhatt’s lens has travelled several decades and geographies including Gujarat, Rajasthan, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, and West Bengal. The result is an immersive exhibition where she documents crafts of India displayed on painted walls, shrines, domestic architecture, decorative surfaces, and handcrafted objects embedded within everyday life. Presented by Gallery Vayu, in collaboration with LATITUDE 28, the 32 photographs move between documentation and visual observation, capturing disappearing craft traditions and the textures of lived spaces shaped by memory, community habitation, and intergenerational practices.

When: May 21 – 31, 2026

Where: Gallery Vayu, 14 Main Market, Lodhi Road, New Delhi

Candlelight Concert: Tribute to A.R. Rahman

The globally popular Candlelight Concerts arrives in New Delhi with a live tribute to A. R. Rahman. Set entirely under the luminescence of candlelight, the concert presents reinterpretations of Rahman’s compositions through live instrumentation and acoustics. Designed as an intimate listening experience, the format blends performance and ambience for audiences across age groups.

When: May 16, 2026 | 6 PM onwards

Where: Le Méridien, New Delhi

Slow Rot

In an age of filters, virality, trends, and AI, are we forgetting to internalise our reality? If so, Method Delhi presents Slow Rot, a group exhibition bringing together ten contemporary artists examining vulnerability, psychological unrest, alienation, and the grotesque within contemporary life. The exhibition approaches the grotesque not simply as distortion, but as a lens through which fragility, social anxieties, and emotional disquiet can be examined. Conceptually, the exhibition draws connections with writers and thinkers such as Kamala Das, Charles Bukowski, Saadat Hasan Manto, Sylvia Plath, and Gautama Buddha, all of whom explored suffering, identity, and human vulnerability in different forms.

When: Ongoing till July 3, 2026

Where: Method Delhi, D-59 Basement, Defence Colony

Celebrating Tagore

To commemorate the 165th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, NCPA presents Celebrating Tagore, an evening dedicated to Indian classical dance traditions inspired by Tagore’s literary and musical legacy. The programme brings together Odissi, Kathak, Bharatanatyam, and Rabindra Nritya performances by dancers Debamitra Sengupta, Keka Sinha, and Chitra Vishwanathan. Through various choreographic interpretations, the evening revisits the emotional and philosophical dimensions of Tagore’s work.

When: May 21, 2026 | 6:30 PM

Where: NCPA, Nariman Point, Mumbai

Habitat Film Festival

Too tired to scour through good indie films? The much-awaited 18th edition of the Habitat Film Festival presents a curated selection of feature films, documentaries, and short films from 2025–2026 with films screened in over 20 Indian languages, including Khasi, Karbi, Bhili, Bhojpuri, Malayalam, Bengali, and Hindi. The festival offers an expansive overview of regional cinematic voices and contemporary filmmaking practices, alongside retrospectives, filmmaker conversations, workshops, exhibitions, and discussions. A retrospective dedicated to Ritwik Ghatak includes landmark films such as Meghe Dhaka Tara, Subarnarekha, and Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, alongside classics, award-winning and contemporary films.

When: May 15 – 24, 2026

Where: India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Estate, New Delhi

Cartographies of the Inner World

The exhibition explores themes of memory, femininity, ecology, domesticity, and emotional landscapes through painting and mixed media works brought in by Bengaluru’s art gallery, KYNKYNY’s debut in Mumbai.  It brings the works of seven women artists, Dimpy Menon, Veenita Chendvankar, Payal Rokade, Bakula Nayak, Rakhee Shenoy, Priyanka Aelay, and Nidhi Mariam Jacob, that examine how inner worlds of women are shaped by lived experiences, nature, and cultural memory.

When: On till May 24

Where: Khotachiwadi, 47A Khotachiwadi

She

She brings together works by seven South Asian women artists across geographies, including India, Bhutan, Oman, and the wider South Asian diaspora. Through painting, mixed media, and material experimentation, the artists explore identity, memory, domestic rituals, kinship, and the social structures shaping women’s lives. The exhibition also reflects on the tensions between vulnerability and resilience, tradition and modernity, personal agency and inherited expectations, that every woman goes through in some point of her life.

When: May 25 – July 5, 2026

Where: Gallery Pristine Contemporary, Saini Bhawan, New Delhi