New Art Landmark For Hyderabad: Maison D’Art Banjara Will Open Next Week With Solo Exhibition By French Photographer Anne Garde

Hyderabad’s cultural landscape is set to welcome a significant new addition as Maison D’Art Banjara prepares to open its gallery space at the Ashiana-Imli Sarai complex in Banjara Hills on 3 December 2025. The gallery’s debut exhibition, Shiva Blues, will feature the evocative work of celebrated French fine art photographer Anne Garde. The launch will take place in partnership with Alliance Française Hyderabad, bringing this international showcase to the city for the first time.

New Cultural Space Coming to Hyderabad

Maison D’Art Banjara is being developed as an open, welcoming space dedicated to visual art across a range of mediums. The gallery aims to present works that spark cultural curiosity and explore how individuals and communities connect across different worlds and traditions.

Its inaugural exhibition spotlights French fine art photographer Anne Garde, long associated with the gallery’s founding family. After its launch, Maison D’Art Banjara plans to energise the artistic life of Banjara Hills through regular exhibitions, talks, workshops, and neighbourhood-focused events.

Shiva Blues

Opening alongside the gallery is Shiva Blues, Garde’s visually striking series created during her travels through North India. Shot on a Hasselblad film camera and processed using a rare chemical inversion method, Garde’s portraits transform everyday individuals into surreal, blue-toned figures. The images evoke Shiva Neelkanta: the Blue-Throated God of Hindu mythology, who drank poison to save the cosmos. By blending lived experience with mythic symbolism, Garde’s work explores the balance between creation and destruction, the earthly and the divine.

Anne Garde's series evokes Shiva Neelkanta (Anne Garde)

Maud Miquau, Director of Alliance Française Hyderabad, said: “Anne Garde’s photographs offer an unexpected vision of India. Blue floods the bodies, inevitably recalling Lord Shiva and, through him, the divine spark within us and all around us.”

Garde describes the origins of the series in her journeys through Rajasthan, where she photographed men and women who seemed almost god-like in their presence. When she later processed the film using an unconventional chemical bath, the colours inverted and the bodies appeared blue, instantly connecting her work to the myth of Neelkanta, where Shiva absorbs the deadly Halahala to protect the world.

Garde is a graduate of the Sorbonne and the École du Louvre. Her analogue photographic practice investigates the space between the seen and the unseen, blending documentary sensibility with a dreamlike atmosphere. A recipient of the Villa Medici Hors les Murs grant for Salon Indien, she continues to explore cultural encounters with depth and curiosity.

A photograph of North Indian women from the series (Anne Garde)

Event Details:

Inauguration & Exhibition Opening

When: Wednesday, 3 December 2025, 7 pm

Where: Maison D’Art Banjara, Ashiana-Imli Sarai, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad

French fine art photographer Anne Garde's show Shiva Blues is on view until 3 February, 2026

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