The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, will host its first-ever exhibition dedicated to contemporary Indian art, titled "Sediments of Becoming: Fossilised Present, Summoned Pasts," opening June 4 and running through October 4. The show features 11 Indian artists—including Manjunath Kamath, Afrah Shafiq, Gargi Raina, Lakshmi Madhavan, V Ramesh, Anindita Bhattacharya, Debashish Mukherjee, Maya Krishna Rao, Pushpamala N, Ravinder Reddy, and Sumakshi Singh—and is presented in collaboration with Threshold Art Gallery, curated by Marina Schulz and Tunty Chauhan. The artists created new works during a 2025 residency at the Hermitage, supported by collectors Ekaterina and Andrey Terebenin, and the pieces are displayed in dialogue with historical objects from the museum's collections and other Russian institutions.
This exhibition matters because it marks a historic cultural dialogue between India and one of the world's most renowned museums, challenging traditional narratives that have often framed Indian art as ethnographic artifact rather than living, contemporary practice. At a time of global geopolitical fracture, the show asserts that culture transcends politics, offering audiences a rare encounter with the depth and conceptual ambition of contemporary Indian art. By commissioning new works and placing them in conversation with centuries-old objects, the exhibition repositions artistic practice as a form of cultural archaeology and claims narrative authority for Indian artists to tell their own civilization's story from within.