Ahmedabad, September 2025: StoneX, globally recognized 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 invited guests an unforgettable multisensory encounter with one of India’s most enduring art forms. 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. 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.
“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.
‘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, conjuring softness, weightlessness, 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 labor, 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.
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.
Honouring a Lineage of Master Artisans
Ms Prachi Bhattacharya, CEO StoneX Art said, “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.”
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.
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.
