First contemporary Indian art exhibition at State Hermitage Museum in Russia to begin June 4

The historic State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia, will host its first dedicated contemporary Indian art exhibition from June 4, featuring works by Manjunath Kamath, Afrah Shafiq, Gargi Raina, Lakshmi Madhavan, and V Ramesh, among others.

"Sediments of Becoming: Fossilised Present, Summoned Pasts", presented in collaboration with Threshold Art Gallery and curated by Marina Schulz and Tunty Chauhan, will bring together works of 11 contemporary Indian artists in "an important moment of cultural dialogue between India and one of the world's most historically significant museums".

A first in the institution's 260-year history, the exhibition conceives of "artistic practice as a form of cultural archaeology, proceeding from the conviction that to uncover is to disturb, and to interpret is to participate in the making of history itself", according to the organisers.

The exhibition features works by Anindita Bhattacharya, Debashish Mukherjee, Maya Krishna Rao, Pushpamala N, Ravinder Reddy, and Sumakshi Singh.

Chauhan, founder of Threshold Art Gallery, said that the exhibition at "a moment of acute global fracture" is a reminder that "objects and cultures travel across geographies regardless of the lines drawn across maps, and that it is in resisting their erasure that art bears witness".

"The exhibition is proof of that conviction that culture outlasts politics, and an invitation to its audiences to encounter, perhaps for the first time, a glimpse into the depth of what India carries. The significance of this exhibition cannot be overstated. The Hermitage's collections have shaped generations of scholars, curators, and audiences across the world.

"To present contemporary Indian art here, not as an artefact, not as an ethnographic specimen, but as a living, commissioned, conceptually ambitious practice, is to make a claim that extends far beyond the walls of any single exhibition. It is a claim about narrative authority," she said.

Chauhan added that the artworks offer a voice of artists who are "engaged in making their civilisation's history visible not as it has been perceived from the outside, not as it has been collected, classified and displayed, but as it is lived, questioned, and remade from within".

The exhibition will feature works that are presented in dialogic conversation with objects from earlier periods - icons, frescoes, graphic prints and decorative arts, from the collections of the State Hermitage Museum, the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) and the National Library of Russia.

Marina Schulz, head of the Contemporary Art Department, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, said that the exhibition has emerged out of a "genuine desire to understand the other".

The artists were invited to produce new works specifically for the exhibition, either in response to its conceptual framework or following their engagement with the Hermitage collections during a residency held at the museum in 2025 with the support of collectors Ekaterina and Andrey Terebenin and Threshold Art Gallery .

"The juxtaposition is not intended to embellish the exhibition or to lend additional authority to contemporary works, but to provide historical context and illuminate the artistic traditions upon which Indian artists draw; and ultimately to reveal parallels, connections and unexpected affinities that allow even the most complex conceptual frameworks to be grasped intuitively," Schulz said.

The exhibition will come to an end on October 4.
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