The Raza Festival (12th-18th December, 2021), organized by KCC in collaboration with the Raza Foundation, celebrated the life and work of S.H. Raza through ‘Raza Veethika’, an exhibition comprising prints of Raza’s works and selected originals from the collection of Emami Group of Companies. The Festival, which consisted of talk sessions or ‘Raza Vaarta’ and performances, also brought together distinguished artists and scholars from various disciplines to approach the concept of abstraction from the perspective of their respective disciplines. Raza Veethika—an exhibition of the prints and selected originals of S. H. Raza was an integral part of The Raza Festival conceived in collaboration with the Raza Foundation. Raza’s oeuvre allows a remarkable insight into what happens when an artist engages for decades on two of visual art’s prime concerns: shapes and colours. The works in this exhibition, some of his most refined, showcased how in the artist’s mind, these two primal constituents of a painting take form, responding to the environment as well as the inner world. The association between signifier and signified is arbitrarily determined, developed largely by cultural specificities. However, in visual language, the shapes are more elementary, derived from one’s immediate contact with nature and the world around. The world of visuals is one that is seen and experienced by all, here and everywhere. The shapes - squares, circles and triangles - in the paintings of S.H. Raza, thus, have an immediate connect to the viewer. As one explored the exhibition, the titles of the artworks often served as hints, drawing focus on the circle over the square or the triangle, or vice versa. But even without them, one did not feel totally lost. Roaming the halls led to the happy realization that these paintings are constructed with the same elementary shapes, and woven together with colours.