To Russia, with love: Indian contemporary art arrives at the Hermitage that houses masterpieces by Rembrandt and Raphael

The State Hermitage Museum in Russia’s St Petersburg has been the bastion of European civilisation and colonial conquest for over 250 years. It has a vast library of classical antiquities and one of the richest painting collections in the world, including Titian and Raphael, Rubens and Rembrandt. But Indian art has not made it to its splendid halls—until now. Golden threads from Kerala and an interactive exploration of Soviet-era children’s books in India are part of “Sediments of Becoming”, a new exhibition of contemporary Indian art, which has just opened at the museum and will be on display till October.

Marina Schultz, head of contemporary art at the Hermitage and curator of the show, says Indian art has not been shown in Russia since a 2009 collaboration between the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg and the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi. The current exhibition, she says, is not a result of “official visits, institutional exchanges, or political decisions”, but “friendships, horizontal connections” and “a genuine desire to understand the other”.

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Eleven Indian artists are showing their works nindita Bhattacharya, Manjunath Kamath, Lakshmi Madhavan, Debasish Mukherjee, Pushpamala N, Gargi Raina, V Ramesh, Maya Krishna Rao, Ravinder Reddy, Sumakshi Singh and Afrah Shafiq.

VISUAL AFTERLIFE

Some of the works were created specifically for this show. Bhattacharya says, “What interested me most was the idea that history does not simply sit behind us—it lingers across time.” She spent several weeks in Russia on a research residency, studying Russian icons, Lubki woodcut prints, Sovietera visual culture and Mughal miniatures. The idea of a visual afterlife caught her imagination. “A central focus of my residency was to study how visual languages survive change, how traditions of image-making endure rupture.” For instance, sacred imagery may become secular or more closely tied to everyday life, or visual languages may absorb new symbols and narratives to survive changing regimes.

“Visual languages stay alive by negotiating the conditions around them,” says Bhattacharya, who presents a suite of 12 small paintings titled, “Blooming of Broken Wings”, made with natural pigment and gouache on wasli paper in the miniature style. The storytelling shifts to the borders in As the Sea Forgets Its Shores, a large work on textile, the periphery depicting a restless sea and the lifeforms persevering within that disturbance.

Madhavan shows “Looming Bodies”, a body of work developed through her long engagement with the kasavu weavers in Kerala, which was earlier shown at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The act of weaving carries its history in the body of the weaver before it is carried over in the cloth. Madhavan’s work centres the weaver and suggests that bodies become living repositories of knowledge and cultural transmission. “This was the first time I introduced photography into my practice, bringing the weaving body and the wearing body into the same frame.”

Multimedia artist Shafiq’s video installation, Nobody Knows for Certain, explores the ties between India and Soviet Russia in the Cold War era, through children’s books. The Soviet books were translated into English and Indian languages and distributed at low prices across the country from the 1960s to the 1980s. They embedded Soviet fairytales in the childhood imagination of an entire generation. “The outreach in India took place through a well-mapped distribution plan,” says Shafiq.

Indian art will be displayed with other works from the Hermitage’s collection. Schultz says, “This juxtaposition is not intended to embellish or lend additional authority to contemporary works but to provide a historical context upon which Indian artists draw.”

The Hermitage Museum is one of the largest and most visited in the world. It was founded by Empress Catherine II as a court museum, following the purchase of a big collection of Western European paintings. Now it has about 3 million artefacts, housed in a large complex of interconnected buildings —including the Winter Palace and the Old, New and Small Hermitages.

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The idea for the Indian exhibition germinated during a dialogue, initiated by Russian art collector Andrey Terebenin, between the Hermitage and Tunty Chauhan’s Gallery Threshold in Delhi.

Chauhan says India and Russia have a history of shared cultural fascination. Recalling Nicholas Roerich, she says, “A Russian painter who came to call the Himalayas his home and found in Indian philosophy something that his own western training had not given him. That quality of seeking, of being changed by the encounter, is the best kind of cultural exchange.”

This fascination did not die with the dissolution of the USSR, Chauhan says, it just went underground or “sedimented”. And now it emerges in the White Hall of the Hermitage.