Join us to celebrate Divya Balivada’s new exhibition at RSA House, exploring India-UK relations and histories.
In Between speaks to continual negotiation between geographies, histories, and identities. The exhibition navigates the relational space between India and the UK as overlapping forces that have shaped complex narratives around memory, belonging, and distance. Divya Balivada occupies this in-between space both physically and psychologically.
The private view is on 12 February 2026, 6 – 8 pm. The exhibition is on view from 13th February to 15th March 2026 at Tavern Room, RSA House, 8 John Adam Street WC2N 6EZ. To visit, please RSVP at laure.barthelemy@rsa.org.uk
Divya Balivada
Divya Balivada is an Indian artist who recently graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, where she was shortlisted for the Jaguar x RCA Prize 2025. Balivada was a trained dentist before she became a painter. She has exhibited internationally, from the Bombay Arts Society in Mumbai to her recent show at Flowers Gallery in London. She has received the Women’s Achiever Art Award 2024 in Goa, India. She will soon be exhibiting at the Goa Open Arts Festival in Goa, India.
Balivada’s practice explores how cyclicity and impermanence are intrinsic facets of the human experience, constituting patterns of stability and rupture that operate on both an individual and societal level. Drawing from her experiences, she examines how generational trauma, gender biases and displacement influence identity and wider perception. Balivada uses abstraction as an interpretational tool, with recursive gestures in her painting that hover between compulsive and meditative. She turns to the ‘decorative’ as a site for reclamation, challenging its historical devaluation. Her choice of colours draws on the nature and sensorial richness of Goa, where she grew up. She herself navigates painting as a necessity, an instinctive way of being, seeing herself as a vessel for something larger.
