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Curatorial Note

Sediments of Becoming arrives at the Hermitage at a moment of acute global fracture, not as a response to the present, but as a reminder of all that endures beneath it. The exhibition conceives of artistic practice as a form of cultural archaeology, approaching culture as a layered terrain in which memory, identity, and history are continuously produced, contested, and reinterpreted. Like sedimented layers of history, each era leaves a fossilized imprint on the subcontinent’s cultural consciousness. To uncover is to disturb; to interpret is to participate in the making of history itself.

In the Indian context, where the dominant instruments of interpretation, the colonial archive, the ethnographic gaze, the imperial museum, have so often belonged to others, the reclamation of that act by the artist carries particular conviction. The participating artists, each with a distinct vocabulary, demonstrate the conceptual rigor and formal diversity of contemporary voices who carry India’s civilisational depth into the present tense.

To present these works at the State Hermitage Museum, a site through which strata of Indian heritage have passed, via cultural diplomacy, colonial exchanges, or dynastic spoils, is to invite an encounter of an entirely different order. Not display. Not artifact. But contemporary voice.