Chitra Ganesh’s Show Journey to the Great Below is a Revelation

Chitra Ganesh Journey to the Great Below at Baltic Centre

Chitra Ganesh Journey to the Great Below is the artist’s first major UK solo exhibition at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. The exhibition turns descent into a way of thinking by using Mesopotamian and South Asian visual histories to challenge linear time and imagine speculative, queer and feminist futures.

Official exhibition page: https://baltic.art/exhibitions/chitra-ganesh-journey-to-the-great-below/

Curated by Emma Dean, the exhibition unfolds as an immersive sequence of sculptural thresholds. Visitors move through a conceptual underworld inspired by Inanna’s descent to confront Ereshkigal. Meanwhile, Ganesh transforms that myth into a lived spatial experience: the show demands the viewer to pass through it, physically and intellectually.

Moreover, The installation’s architecture drives the exhibition. Gates, arches, staircases and monumental forms echo ancient gateways and rock-cut statuary. However, Ganesh reimagines them as speculative structures that blur antiquity and futurism.

Instead, the exhibition refuses to treat myth as a closed historical archive. Instead, Ganesh draws from Sumerian poetry and Mesopotamian cosmologies. She also uses South Asian comics, tarot, anime and contemporary theory. Together, these influences create an unruly visual language. The result is densely layered and deliberately hybrid: part archaeology, part sci-fi, part dream logic.

That hybridity appears throughout the exhibition. A monumental glowing hand, sculptural legs, an oversized eye and a descending staircase represent different moments in Inanna’s journey. Recent paintings and prints expand the emotional and visual world.

Ganesh’s interest in drawing and painting remains visible throughout the exhibition. She also expands her practice through 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.

Journey to the Great Below and Ancient Myth

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.

Today, history is often reduced to slogans and national mythologies. However, Journey to the Great Below offers a different perspective. 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