Art & architecture
A 3.2-kilometre art wall, 5,500 artefacts and a roof modelled on a peacock's tail feather. Most of Mumbai will never see it.
A museum you need a boarding pass to enter
The Jaya He GVK New Museum — presented by the airport today as The ArtBeat of New India — opened with Terminal 2 in January 2014. It was commissioned under GVK, conceived by G V Sanjay Reddy and curated by Rajeev Sethi, one of South Asia's leading scenographers.
It is routinely described as one of the largest public art programmes at any airport in the world, and as India's largest public art collection: more than 5,500 artefacts and over a hundred installations by around 100 artists and 1,000 artisans, drawn from 28 states, with objects dating back as far as the 11th century, all documented and certified with India's archaeological authorities.
Published figures vary: the airport's current wording is "over 5,500 artefacts" along a 3.2 km wall covering more than 200,000 square feet, while press accounts have cited up to 7,000 works and areas as large as 54,000 m². Treat any single precise number with suspicion.
Jaya He at a glance
- Opened
- January 2014, with Terminal 2
- Curator
- Rajeev Sethi
- Where
- The central curved wall of T2, across four levels
- Access
- Airside only, T2 passengers
- Cost
- Free — it is part of the terminal
Three sections, six themes
Thresholds of India
The long multi-storey wall along the departures circulation route, top-lit by skylights. Architectural fragments and doorways, temple chariots, boats, carts, ritual objects and everyday domestic things.
This is the section most passengers actually walk past, and the one worth arriving early for.
Layered Narratives
The arrivals corridor, flanking the moving walkways on the way to baggage reclaim. Twenty-nine commissioned contemporary works by more than 25 Indian artists, mapping Mumbai and the changing Indian city.
Artists named in coverage include Jagannath Panda, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Alexis Kersey.
Baggage Acclaimed
Sculptural installations on and around the baggage carousels themselves, themed on Indian textile and costume traditions.
Designer contributions are reported to include Manish Arora and Ritu Kumar — the one part of the collection nobody misses, because you have to stand in front of it.
The six themes within Thresholds of India
The six-zone naming is consistent across independent accounts but does not appear on the airport's current pages, which name only the three sections.
How to actually experience it
Arrive early on purpose
The wall runs the length of the departures route. If you clear security with twenty minutes to spare you will see nothing; with an hour you can walk it.
Use the audio guide
A Jaya He app for Android and iOS — also listed as The Artbeat of New India — gives narration, images and video. QR codes near the artefacts open the guide, and narration plays offline in aeroplane mode.
Book the Museum Safari
A free guided art walk for departing T2 passengers, roughly 15 minutes across four levels, launched on International Museum Day in 2017. Booked via an online form; bookings close 48 hours before departure and are subject to availability. Departing passengers only.
Look up on arrival too
Layered Narratives runs alongside the arrivals travelators and Baggage Acclaimed sits on the carousels — so even a bad arrival has something to look at.
Jaya He Museum Store & Gallery
A 55 m² store with a 45 m² gallery inside T2, selling replicas of the artworks displayed in the terminal alongside Indian craft objects, with the gallery showing work by local artists. Designed by ABM Architects.
Verify on the day we could not confirm the store's current level or whether it is still trading.
The roof: a peacock's tail, cast thousands of times
Terminal 2 was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's New York office under design partner Roger Duffy, built by Larsen & Toubro, lit by Brandston Partnership and signed by Pentagram with Entro. Design completed 2010; opened January 2014.
The coffers
The design team took the iridescent, teardrop-shaped eye of the peacock's tail feather — India's national bird — as the motif for the coffered panels. Around 8,500 panels, each roughly 9 ft 2 in by 8 ft 9 in, clad the ceiling: glass-fibre reinforced gypsum inside, glass-fibre reinforced concrete outside.
Each panel carries a two-to-three-foot aperture for lighting, and each aperture holds a laminated lens with a disc of dichroic film that produces two different colours depending on the angle at which light strikes it. That is the mechanism behind the shifting iridescence — it is not a printed pattern, it is optics.
More than 15,500 components were produced from over 500 moulds. Jali screens — the traditional Indian perforated lattice — filter light into the concourses.
The structure
| Roof area | ~70,000 m² — described by SOM as one of the world's largest roofs without an expansion joint |
| Columns | 30, concrete-encased steel, 131 ft tall, capitals mushrooming to 111 ft wide |
| Column grid | 64 m north–south, 34 m east–west |
| Clear spans | 111 ft and 210 ft |
| Gross area | 450,000 m² over four storeys, on a 105-hectare site |
| Certification | LEED BD+C: NC Gold |
The columns were engineered to double as hoists, so the roof could be built without tower cranes on a constrained live-airport site.
Awards
AIA Institute Honor Award for Architecture (2020); ASCE/AEI Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Award (2016); Architype Review US Airports & Transportation Award (2012).
The control tower
87.5 m tall — India's second highest after Delhi's — a three-dimensional triangle with soft vertices, inaugurated October 2013 and operational from January 2014. It won a Hong Kong BIM award for its design.
Conflicting numbers
Sources give the coffer count as either 8,500 panels or "more than 4,000 coffers" — they are probably counting different things. Roof height is cited as both 36 m (SOM) and 42 m. We have used SOM's figures where they conflict.
Give yourself an extra half hour
It is the only way to see any of this. Check how early to arrive, then spend the difference walking the wall rather than sitting at the gate.