Holiday Homework begins with a simple proposition. What does childhood look like when it is no longer shaped by mass production?

In recent decades, childhood has been increasingly defined by industrial design and global manufacturing. A vast majority of objects made for children move quickly from use to discard, entering landfill cycles within a short span. What is lost in this process is not only material longevity but a slower, more attentive engagement with imagination, care and the tactile world.

LOAM approaches this rupture by positioning childhood as a site of cultural production rather than consumption.

Holiday Homework invites artists to reimagine the material and conceptual conditions of growing up. It asks what happens when artists, rather than industries, construct the environments of play. Bringing together 20 artists across practices, the exhibition foregrounds work engaging with care, play, pedagogy and memory. These artists, active within the contemporary art ecosystem, turn toward childhood as a critical space that shapes perception and imagination. Their works resist standardisation and instead offer open-ended, research-driven approaches that encourage deeper engagement.

To build a community of practitioners LOAM released an open call to find artists who are invested in rethinking childhood collectively. This shifts the exhibition from a presentation of objects to a platform for discourse.

A child's room is the first gallery they will ever know. Their parents, the first curators. Contemporary Indian Art belongs here, not only in white-walled institutions, but in the everyday spaces where imagination is first formed.

LOAM brings practicing artists into schools, and invites students to enter the discourse as practitioners themselves. Guided by a single question; what role do artists play in the cultural language of society? Students respond through an Open Call, proposing functional and conceptual works that are exhibited at Holiday Homework alongside established artists. Economic participation is part of the pedagogy. The children are not observers, they are contributors.

With gratitude to Shefali Varma and the Ardee Foundation, whose recognition of this initiative has made it possible and whose students bring that same spirit of agency to the Ardee Entrepreneurship Wall.

Holiday Homework is a proposition toward a future where childhood is not mass produced but carefully constructed. It marks the beginning of LOAM’s commitment to building a sustained platform where artists reinterpret childhood with intention, care and imagination.