Ganesh and the team have gone full-on theatrical with the scenography: we enter a darkened space and are drawn immediately towards and through an animated blue gateway with projections of owls, goddesses and constellations playing across its facade. We proceed towards a headless votive figure — illuminated in eerie green — with a doorway at its centre, beyond which we encounter a sculpture in the shape of a large, glowing eye. Its "pupil" plays fiery swirls of cosmological, meteorological or botanical phenomena.

Chitra Ganesh’s Journey to the Great Below at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, is an exhibition of impressive scope and scale. It is the artist’s first substantial solo show in the UK and a significant undertaking.

I first discovered Chitra Ganesh’s work as a graduate student at Columbia University in 2012. I was excited by how feminism and drawing were active threads illuminating materials from prints to paintings to wall paintings to installations to the moving digital screen. Her work connected things that made my heart beat, from ancient floral symbols to shaking fluorescent subway lights.

The artist’s latest animation chronicles a Mesopotamian goddess’s ordeal in the realm of lost souls

At the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, the artist draws on Mesopotamian and South Asian mythologies to challenge linear histories and imagine speculative futures.

There is a lot to take in - but even on a fleeting visit and merely skimming the surface you will be able to see and appreciate some beautiful drawing and exquisite pictures.

Maybe do that first and then return for the deep stuff on a later occasion. There is time.

Chitra Ganesh: Journey to the Great Below is at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, until January 17, 2027. Baltic opens Wednesday to Sunday.

Review of 'Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain' (Warbler Press Annotated Edition, 2024) edited by Ben Baer and Smaran Dayal

Contemporary South Asian printmakers and photographers depict figures forever in flux in “Body Transformed,” a show at the National Museum of Asian Art.

'Exhibitionism', the inaugural showcase at Rajiv Menon Contemporary gallery in Hollywood, examines the boundaries of intimacy.

Chitra Ganesh discusses her piece on view, "All the Farewells," and how growing up Brooklyn informed her artistic pursuits.

There are boundless ways to interpret the artist’s works, each populated with fierce femmes and curious chimera, and layered with symbols.

A hybrid beast, a woman with a cat-like tail and tiger’s head, clad in a magenta jumpsuit, is poised on all fours in the middle of Chitra Ganesh’s large painting, Enter the Jungle (all works 2024).

The movement’s core message was and is one of championing radical freedom of thought and modern experiments in literature and visual arts.

The large scale works of art by Chitra Ganesh and Eirini Linardaki are going to make you stop in your tracks, pun intended.

The intergenerational artists of the exhibition The World that Belongs to Us draw upon the nuanced colonial history to revisit its ramifications in current times.

This comic is part of a series Drawn to Art: Tales of Inspiring Women Artists that illuminates the stories of women artists in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Inspired by graphic novels, these short takes on artists’ lives were each drawn by a student-illustrator from the Ringling College of Art and Design.

Crafting a career in the arts is notoriously difficult. Sustaining oneself financially while doing so? An art in and of itself. To help those finding their footing, CULTURED asked nine seasoned artists—including Marilyn Minter, Walter Robinson, and Paul Rucker—to shed light on the most unexpected yet effective advice they’ve ever received. Read below for their tips on being sensitive, going on IG live, and navigating workplace relationships.

Today, contemporary artists of the South Asian diaspora are exploring futurism, hybridity, and spiritual traditions to shed light on migration and the subsequent search for home. Rajni Perera, Misha Japanwala, Suchitra Mattai, Chitra Ganesh, and Ashwini Bhat draw inspiration from their global ancestries, namely cultures from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Guyana, and India.

Queer Power! A Time Travelling Coloring Book honors LGBTQI+ activists and cultural icons.