There is something bracing about an exhibition that refuses to pretend that it has arrived at an answer. Imaginarium 5.0 at Emami Art was a long, unsettled conversation, returning to the same problems because they remain unresolved. How time is organised. How bodies are supervised. Who is written into history and who is omitted.
And, threading through everything, who is allowed space and on what terms.
Landscape here is not a picturesque backdrop. It appears as history. Pankaj Sarma’s riverine Assam is shaped by policy and remembered catastrophe where the Anthropocene is lived memory. Farhin Afza approaches place differently, filtering the nation-state through biography and migration, identity emerging as negotiation rather than inheritance (picture, left). The body refuses to behave too. Rahul Sarkar treats ornament as provocation, unsettling masculinity and queer visibility. Mitali Das performs a parallel defiance by centering ageing, desiring female bodies.
Even care reveals its teeth. Tejal Kawachi’s photographs of medical systems show how tenderness and surveillance arrive together. Abela Ruben extends this unease into domestic and cinematic space, where feeling appears choreographed. Manoj Kumar Pannala exposes caste violence embedded in vernacular archives, while Aman Kumar borrows from miniature painting to critique digital excess. Some works simply observe. Sanyukta Kudtarkar and Anurag Paul hover around daily life, recalling psychogeography and social realism.
Elsewhere, The Craft of Comics at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture reminded viewers that the supposedly unserious form often handles serious matters with ease. Comics speak fluently about politics, violence, memory and intimacy without announcing it. Priya Kuriyan’s account of her grandmother’s experience of domestic
violence unfolds with quiet directness, as does Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s return to the paranoia of the Emergency.
Amruta Patil, from Adi Parva Birla Academy of Art and Culture
Chitra Ganesh revisits femininity, sexuality and power through mythic narrative, while Amruta Patil loosens the tyranny of panels (picture, right), allowing images to breathe like Kangra paintings. Sankha Banerjee approaches the epics with realism, whereas Sarnath Banerjee’s caricaturish style gestures towards a syncretic India slipping into memory.
Ita Mehrotra’s drawings remain deliberately open-ended and Orijit Sen reassigns icons to local trades; Che Guevara is a chaiwala, Salvador Dalí a house painter. Sarbajit Sen adopts indigenous idioms without nostalgia, while Appupen’s dense, futuristic visions feel ominous and meticulous.
What lingers are works that sidestep expectation — the shifting light in Joshy Benedict, Argha Manna’s scientific preoccupations, Ikroop Sandhu’s meditation on the ownership of possessions after death. Together, they show comics at their best — scathing, but humorous; with a light touch but unsparing about serious issues; most importantly, trusting the reader’s intelligence to read between the panels.