In a darkened space, frames from Afrah Shafiq’s Nobody Knows for Certain unfurl as digital stories. This archival game—interactive fiction—which will be shown at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia, acts like a bridge between the past and the present. Shafiq is one of the 11 Indian artists all set to show their work at Sediments of Becoming at the State Hermitage Museum, one of the oldest cultural institutions of the modern world.
Shafiq has been delving deep into the cultural exchanges that took place between India and the erstwhile Soviet Union during the Cold War. She specifically focuses on the storybooks, folktales and magazines such as Soviet Land, which made their way into India and were translated into regional languages. Shafiq draws on the collective nostalgia of a generation of children who grew up with those stories to create an independent narrative. You get a console, similar to a video game, and navigate your way through the story.
In one of the frames, you can see a gamut of winged creatures rising above the clouds, traditional motifs riding the waves alongside translated pages of books and magazines. Amidst this fantastical imagery, a keyboard appears, seemingly incongruous. The accompanying thought bubble, “Slowly this news spread across the land,” is a subtle allusion to the manner in which storytelling continues to be used to further state propaganda. Earlier it was done through magazines, now via social media. Her work shows that the act of telling stories becomes a site of control and subversion, shaping the histories of nations.
The exhibition, which will run from 4 June to 4 October, is being described as one of the first dedicated Indian contemporary art shows in the museum’s 260-year history. It comes at a time of deep fractures in global geopolitics, including the Russia-Ukraine war. Guest curator Tunty Chauhan, who is the founder-director of Delhi’s Gallery Threshold, says that the universality and relevance of the exhibition will foreground the porous nature of cultural borders and the contested terrain of identity.
Curated by Chauhan and Marina Schulz, head of contemporary art department at the museum, Sediments of Becoming shows the work of mid-career artists such as Anindita Bhattacharya, Debashish Mukherjee, Lakshmi Madhavan, Manjunath Kamath, Maya Krishna Rao, Sumakshi Singh and V. Ramesh, each with a distinct vocabulary and conceptual rigour.
According to Schulz, 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 at the museum in 2025 with the support of collectors of Indian art, Ekaterina and Andrey Terebenin.
A point that comes up time and again during a conversation with Chauhan is that this exhibition is in no way a portrait of India or an attempt to present India as a subject to the world. The works don’t stem from an ethnographic gaze.
“They don’t come down from colonial exchanges or through dynastic spoils to be interpreted and contextualised by a scholar in order to put India in perspective,” she says. Rather, the artists in their unique ways question the stability of historical narratives and open them to reinterpretation.
Working across painting, sculpture, performance, installation and photography, these art practitioners act as “cultural archaeologists, peeling back the many layers of India’s visual and performance traditions to reveal, question and reimagine the foundations upon which the present is built,” adds Chauhan.
Sediments of Becoming features 50 works in all, a mix of old and new creations. These enter into conversations with objects from the Hermitage collection, including icons, frescoes, graphic prints, manuscripts and decorative arts.
Excerpts from the series, Looming Bodies, by Lakshmi Madhavan, a conceptual artist who lives in Mumbai and Balarampuram (Kerala), though not created specifically for the show, fit in with the overall premise. Focused on kasavu, a traditional textile from Kerala, the series “repositions the weaver’s body as an active site of transmission”. Madhavan’s work can be read through strong resonances between the focus on labour laws that emerged in the Soviet Union and Kerala during the height of the Communist period. Looming Bodies, with its photographic grids, loom fragments and wage books, creates an alternative archive of labour, duration and materiality with the weavers as co-authors.
V. Ramesh looks inwards at how spirituality and faith have remained constants through the rise and fall of civilisations. In one of his large-scale works, which uses the board game of Snakes and Ladders as the base, the artist embeds motifs from temple architecture, murals, oleographs, poetry and old manuscripts. According to Ramesh, his practice is more about living modes of transmission than an archaeological excavation of the past. He looks at how an act of devotion becomes both spiritual and social dissent. One of his triptychs, The Saga of Nandanar, pays tribute to the life of 7th-8th century Dalit saint Nandanar. A bonded labourer who was denied entry to the local temple, he overcame social barriers through acts of intense devotion.
And then there are works that seem like jigsaw puzzles. In The Culture Flux, Chapra-born artist Debashish Mukherjee breaks the story of Ladakh’s shifting landscapes into different frames. The narrative, which flows from one frame to another, has emerged from his visits to the region, where Mukherjee saw how the built and natural landscape bore witness to the drastic changes taking place. Every part of the jigsaw asks you to mull over what is remembered, what is forgotten and what is forever rendered irretrievable as rapid urbanisation erases centuries-old legacies.
Manjunath Kamath’s works too can be perceived as broken fragments—or scattered phrases from a sentence. The pieces drawn from classical sculpture, folk imagery and indigenous visual traditions—a broken wing, eyes of a mythological being, ornate embellishment on ceilings and walls—“move through a varied range of references that resist being traced to one origin”. As a viewer, how do you join them back—do you hark back to what you are familiar with, or take a leap into the unknown to form newer narratives? By rearranging the fragments, do you rework existing myths, legends and histories? These are some of the questions that the artist nudges you to reflect on.
According to Schulz, the upcoming exhibition has not “emerged from official visits, institutional exchanges or political decisions, but from friendships, horizontal connections, a genuine desire to understand the other, moments of intuitive recognition and the passion of collecting”.
The roots of the show go back to 2017 when Chauhan was showing works by the late Priya Ravish Mehra at Threshold. The show resonated tremendously with Andrey Terebenin, who returned the next day with his wife and mother. That’s how the association between Chauhan and the Terebenins was established. “What I liked was that they went beyond the act of collecting to form connections with the artist and craftsperson,” says Chauhan.
During the covid-19 pandemic, the collectors were confined to their home in Russia and came up with the idea of showcasing their collection of Indian art to the audiences there. They enlisted Chauhan’s help to curate a series of shows in 2021-23, which opened in Moscow and then travelled to other cities. This collaboration grew into an idea of a research-based art residency for practitioners from both countries. Chauhan was introduced to Schulz by the Terebenins, who had travelled together to the India Art Fair in 2024. “And two years later, this exhibition is unfolding,” says Chauhan.
The artist residencies were particularly significant in the conceptualisation of the exhibition. These encounters were not attempts at drawing direct parallels between the cultures in India and Russia, but to trace resonances. Among the participating artists, Anindita Bhattacharya’s work particularly emerged directly from this process. Following a research trip to Palekh and Moscow, alongside a close study of icon paintings in the collection of The State Hermitage Museum, Bhattacharya developed a new body of work that reflected these layered visual inheritances. “Together, [Marina and I] look at how the contemporary artist has the power to probe dominant narratives and focus the lens on something that is being overlooked. Artists play such an important role in the way history is perceived and remembered," she adds.