Chitra Ganesh at Baltic

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art presents Journey to the Great Below, the first major solo exhibition in a UK institution by artist Chitra Ganesh.

The exhibition brings together a new large-scale animation, newly commissioned sculptural works and a site-specific wall drawing, alongside recent paintings, prints, works on paper and mixed media.

Ganesh’s practice is rooted in drawing and painting and has a distinctive multidisciplinary approach. Ganesh creates richly layered worlds that probe epic myths and historical narratives to offer speculative visions of society. Reorienting traditional forms of storytelling around queer and femme protagonists, her world building explores themes such as psychic transformation, sexuality, power, and loss, centring figures that have long been marginalised.

For this exhibition at Baltic, Ganesh will premiere a new large-scale animation, Journey to the Great Below, inspired by the ancient myth The Descent of Inanna into the Underworld, written c. 1900–1600 BCE in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). In Journey to the Great Below, history, myth, and contemporary life converge.

A new body of sculptures and a site-specific wall drawing create a three-dimensional staging of The Descent of Inanna in real space and time, evoking the ‘Great Below’. Large-scale sculptures, including an oversized eye and a descending staircase, draw upon artefacts held in the collections of The British Museum in London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The wall drawing features collaged elements and vignettes from the poem.

We are proud to be a Major Exhibition Supporter of Journey to the Great Below by artist Chitra Ganesh, on view at Baltic from 4 July 2026 to 17 January 2027.

About Chitra Ganesh

Chitra Ganesh was born in 1975 in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BA in Art-Semiotics and Comparative Literature from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island in 1996. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, Maine in 2001 and received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University, New York in 2002. Ganesh lives and works in Brooklyn.

Ganesh's work has been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally. Solo exhibitions and projects include: Regeneration, New York Penn Station, New York (2024); Astral Dance, Contemporary Calgary, Calgary (2022); Dreaming in Multiverse, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2022); QUEERPOWER, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York (2020); Chitra Ganesh: Her Garden, a mirror, The Kitchen, New York (2018); The Scorpion Gesture and Face of the Future, The Rubin Museum of Art, New York (2018); The Scorpion Gesture, Midnight Moments, Times Square, New York (2018); Afterlives of Blacksites: The Seen Unseen, Index of the Disappeared, Mining Warm Data, Dhaka Art Summit, Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka (2016); Eyes of Time, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2014); She, the Question, Gothenburg Kunsthalle, Gothenburg (2012); Word of God(ess): Chitra Ganesh’s Tales of Amnesia, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2011); On Site 2: The Silhouette Returns, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2009)

About Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art is a major international centre for art situated on the south bank of the River Tyne in Gateshead, England. It has welcomed over 10 million visitors since opening in July 2002. Baltic presents a distinctive and ambitious programme of temporary exhibitions and events and is a world leader in the presentation and commissioning of contemporary visual art. Housed in a landmark ex-industrial building, Baltic houses 2,600 square metres of art space, making it one of Europe’s largest dedicated contemporary art institutions.

Baltic has presented the work of over 877 artists of 78 nationalities in 266 exhibitions to date including Joy Labinjo, Hew Locke, Heather Phillipson, Antony Gormley, Cornelia Parker, Daniel Buren, Lubaina Himid, Steve McQueen, Jenny Holzer, Judy Chicago, Lorna Simpson, Imran Perretta, Huma Bhabha and John Akomfrah.

Images

Chitra Ganesh, Open Expectations of the Unknown Event, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Hales, London and New York. © Chitra Ganesh. Photo by JSP Art Photography.

Chitra Ganesh, Svati, Then & Now, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Hales, London and New York. © Chitra Ganesh. Photo by JSP Art Photography.