The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is hosting "Sediments of Becoming: Fossilised Present, Summoned Pasts," an exhibition curated by Marina Schulz and Tunty Chauhan that features works by eleven contemporary Indian artists, including Afrah Shafiq, Anindita Bhattacharya, Debashish Mukherjee, and others. The show positions contemporary Indian artistic practice within a broader international and civilisational discourse, set against the Hermitage's historic backdrop of over three million objects spanning centuries.
This exhibition matters because it marks a significant moment of cultural dialogue between India and one of the world's most historically significant museums, challenging the traditional presentation of Indian art as colonial spoils or ethnographic specimens. By presenting living, commissioned, conceptually ambitious contemporary Indian art within the Hermitage's hallowed halls, the show makes a claim about narrative authority and cultural diplomacy, asserting that culture outlasts politics and that Indian artists can reclaim the act of interpretation from dominant Western instruments.