Degrees of Exclusion of Languages | Project Showcase@IFA with Poonam Jain | December 10, 2025

how does the state decide which language should exist and which shouldn’t?
how can a language have no use of its own numeral system and what difference does it make?
do we have time as a culture for details that are not materially useful?

At our next Project Showcase@IFA, Poonam Jain will be sharing her experience of working on her project Degrees of Exclusion of Languages, that traced the cultural histories, dilemmas, hierarchies, and erasures that languages navigate in order to survive. Implemented under the Arts Practice programme, the project examined the blurring of boundaries between habit and memory, looking at the histories of Mahajani or Modiya lipi (Marwari), Modi lipi (Marathi), Tamil numerals, Devanagari, and Kannada, and created letterpress types for some of them. 

In her journey, Poonam catalogued and restored found types—seeking out printers, letterpress machines, suitable materials, and language specialists—and how, along the way, she encountered anecdotes, myths, and narratives about different languages. 

Degrees of Exclusion of Languages
December 10, 2025 | 06:30 PM IST
Register on Zoom or join us on Facebook Live.

Poonam works with drawing, installation, text, and gestural works to foreground the intersection of seemingly divergent fields of pedagogy, economy and architecture. She investigates these spaces that one occupies and dwells in at different stages in their lives, looking primarily at language and numbers as some of the common denominators between these spaces. Poonam examines forms of counting in religion, politics, economics, and domestic settings, blurring the lines between these notional spaces to understand the micro-narrative formed by language. Some of her group exhibitions have been in Sapar Contemporary, New York; New Gallery, Paris; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; INSERT 2014, New Delhi. She has had solo exhibitions in Art Dubai by 1x1 art gallery and Clark House Initiative, Bombay. She lives and works in Bombay. 

This session is organised as part of Project Showcase@IFA, a series of presentations to showcase, discuss and engage audiences with the diverse projects we support and implement across programmes.

Image Courtesy: Renuka Rajiv and Poonam Jain

This project was supported by Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.