At the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Chitra Ganesh’s first major UK solo exhibition turns descent into a way of thinking. Journey to the Great Below uses Mesopotamian and South Asian visual histories to unsettle linear time and open up a speculative, queer, and feminist imagination.
Curated by Emma Dean, the exhibition unfolds as an immersive sequence of sculptural thresholds, moving visitors through a conceptual underworld inspired by the ancient story of Inanna’s descent to confront Ereshkigal. Ganesh transforms that myth into a lived spatial experience: the show demands the viewer to pass through it, physically and intellectually.
The installation’s architecture is central to its power. Gates, arches, staircases and monumental forms echo ancient gateways and rock-cut statuary, but they are reworked here as speculative structures that blur antiquity and futurism.
The exhibition refuses to treat myth as a closed historical archive. Instead, Ganesh draws from Sumerian poetry, Harappan and Mesopotamian cosmologies, South Asian comics, tarot, anime, and contemporary theory to build an unruly visual language. The result is densely layered and deliberately hybrid: part archaeology, part sci-fi, part dream logic.
That hybridity carries through the works themselves. A monumental glowing hand, sculptural legs, an oversized eye, a descending staircase and a new animation each stage different moments in Inanna’s journey, while recent paintings and print works expand the emotional and visual field around them. Together, they create a world in which bodies mutate, identities shift, and symbols circulate across time without settling into a single meaning.
Chitra Ganesh: Journey to the Great Below (installation view), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2026. Photo: Tom Carter © 2026 Tom Carter & Baltic
Ganesh’s long-standing interest in drawing and painting remains visible throughout, but here it is amplified by sculpture, animation and installation. Her practice has always been rooted in storytelling, yet Journey to the Great Below pushes that storytelling toward a more embodied and architectural form. The viewer does not simply encounter the myth; they move inside it, almost as if following its logic gate by gate.
The exhibition also speaks sharply to the present. By returning to an ancient descent narrative, Ganesh offers a way of thinking about grief, collapse, regeneration and survival without resorting to straightforward allegory.
At a time when history is frequently flattened into slogans or national mythologies, Journey to the Great Below makes a counter-argument. It insists on complexity, on multiplicity, on the right of images to hold contradiction. That is what gives the exhibition its force: it is not only a show about the underworld, but a vision of how art can descend into the past in order to imagine different futures.
Chitra Ganesh: Journey to the Great Below
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
On view until 17 January 2027
Cover image: Chitra Ganesh: Journey to the Great Below (installation view), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2026. Photo: Tom Carter © 2026 Tom Carter & Baltic
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