By Shalmali Shetty
Chitra Ganesh’s first major UK solo exhibition is nothing like a traditional museum show where visitors passively observe objects in dedicated rooms delineated by rigid historical categories. Curated by Emma Dean, ‘Journey to the Great Below’ sabotages deterministic historical timelines by recovering and reanimating ancient iconographies.
On the fourth floor of the former flour mill awaits a conceptual descent through a sequence of Ganesh’s monumental sculptural ‘thresholds’. Alluding to the ancient gateways of Mesopotamia and the early medieval rock-cut statuary of western India, these speculative architectural structures offer an embodied experience of a fantastical multiverse that forces us into a vulnerable realization of our diminutive presence in the world. Passing through them, visitors enact the perilous journey of the ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna through seven gates into the subterranean realm to confront her sister Ereshkigal, the dark keeper of the underworld.
Through the first arch, Enheduanna’s Gate (2026), we honour the eponymous Sumerian high priestess, poet and the world’s first known named author who penned the earliest surviving hymns to Inanna more than 4000 years ago. The headless torso of a Sumerian Votive Figure (2026) forms a second gateway, opening onto the show’s central sculpture, Cosmic Eye (2026), whose pupil screens an animation of alchemical transformation, stellar births, life and decay. Past a third gateway and into a rear sanctum, we encounter on the floor a large, glowing brown hand – a replica of the artist’s at 12 times the size – its surface animated with projections of motifs including eyes, tears and mehndi designs (Manuscript, 2016). Flanking the corners of the space is a pair of 3D-printed legs descending a metal staircase and a paraffin seal resembling a Cypriot artefact that depicts Ereshkigal in labour (Descent and Rebirth, both 2026). The title film, meanwhile, pulls us in with its mesmerizing technicolour glow: across two screens, a vibrant hand-drawn animation depicts portals and altars to forgotten gods (Journey to the Great Below, 2026).
On one wall, ‘Multiverse Dreaming’ (2020–21), a 12-part digital print series, reinterprets India’s Amar Chitra Katha comics using queer, feminist and tarot iconographies. Adjacent, a series of nine relief prints titled ‘Memories of the Fugue State’ (2024) depicts dream-state bodily transformations set against spectacular imaginaries. Surrounding mixed-media paintings continue this thread of mythic-futuristic posthuman hybridity: deities, chimeras, apsaras, yoginis and dakinis are shown to emerge from wormholes, oceans and cosmic ethers, with further symbols and references spanning the Thangka scrolls, the Burney Relief and sci-fi and anime cyborgs. On closer inspection, we discover the paintings’ tactile surfaces, encrusted with glittering embellishments, beads, synthetic fur, textiles and iridescent beetle wings – like chimerical trophies from the underworld, flickering in the dimly lit gallery.
‘Journey to the Great Below’ is a frenzy of imagery and a masterclass in art history – a deliberate phenomenological encounter informed by Ganesh’s study of semiotics, literature and social theory. In resistance to ‘presentism’, Ganesh invokes a time before mythologies were nationalized and weaponized, turning to the Harappan culture of the Indus Valley Civilization and its parallels with Mesopotamian culture. By tracing the goddess archetype and a direct line of female authorship to Enheduanna, Ganesh pulls these narratives out of patriarchal and colonial archives, centring marginalized protagonists as shapeshifting survivors who inhabit fluid states of being through acts of speculative world-building.
This descent into ancient realms becomes a personal and collective reckoning with our dark present, positioning cycles of death, regeneration and transformation as foundational to being human. Ganesh’s images prompt an active reimagination of our linear biases – one that continued through my exit from the gallery, past Newcastle’s quayside and out the other side of the medieval Black Gate.
