By: Chahat Sharma
This winter, Kolkata’s cultural calendar opens with a landmark event as Birla Academy of Art and Culture presents its 59th Annual Exhibition, running from 9 January to 8 February 2026. Spread across galleries, lawns, and performance spaces, the exhibition brings together contemporary art, public installations, and live performances, each offering visitors much more than a conventional gallery visit.
At the centre of this year’s celebrations is Zameen, a thoughtfully curated exhibition that explores land as memory, labour, inheritance, and lived experience. Alongside it are exciting new initiatives, a competitive showcase of emerging artists, a site-specific public art project, and an engaging performance programme. Together, they make the Academy a space to wander, reflect, and return to.
Ratheesh T
Zameen: An Exhibition That Asks You to Slow Down
Curated by Ina Puri, Zameen is not about landscapes in the traditional sense. Instead, it asks visitors to consider what land means today, who owns it, who is displaced by it, who labours on it, and how memory is carried through soil, water, and built environments.
As you move through the exhibition, you will encounter works that are quiet yet deeply affecting. Some unfold through personal histories, others through material traces, wood, debris, paper, pigment, and photographic images. The exhibition rewards slow looking, allowing visitors to connect the artworks with larger questions of identity, power, ecology, and belonging.
What To Expect Inside Zameen
The exhibition brings together a diverse group of artists, each offering a distinct perspective on land and lived experience.
You will encounter Birender Yadav’s mosaic-like works made from construction debris, where material residue reveals hidden histories of labour and extraction. Debasish Mukherjee maps the changing landscape of Benaras through memory and repetition, using delicate rice paper and mixed media.
Debris of Fate by Debasish Mukherjee
Works by Zarina Hashmi present cities as emotional and political maps, where lines and divisions speak of displacement and loss. K. R. Sunil’s photographic series places traditional performers within their everyday coastal lives, quietly registering how land, livelihood, and climate are intertwined.
The body emerges as a powerful site in Mithu Sen’s work, where tools of survival double as instruments of control. Riyas Komu turns attention to water and stepwells, inviting visitors to think of water as an archive of endurance and survival. In carved wood, V. Vinu treats grief and language as material forms, while Sumedh Rajendran explores how landscape and body carry traces of time, myth, and struggle.
Mithu Sen
Shambhavi Singh reflects on land as inheritance and care rather than property, Vikrant Bhise draws attention to marginalised communities searching for dignity and belonging, and Ratheesh T. recalls Kerala’s agrarian histories marked by hunger, caste violence, and resistance.
Stepwell by Riyas Komu
Together, these works create an exhibition that feels layered and immersive, one that visitors are likely to revisit in thought long after leaving the gallery.
A Platform for New Voices
Beyond Zameen, the 59th Annual Exhibition also features works selected through the Academy’s competitive section. This showcase brings together young and emerging artists from across India and has, over the years, become an important space where new artistic voices meet wider audiences.
For visitors, this section offers a chance to encounter fresh ideas, experimental practices, and the future directions of contemporary Indian art, all within the same visit.
Projects: Art Beyond the Gallery
One of the most exciting additions this year is Projects, a new section dedicated to public art installations in Bengal. This initiative moves art beyond gallery walls and invites visitors to experience large-scale, site-specific works.
The first such project, Terra Kolkata | Burnt Earth and Living City, conceived by Anirban Das and team, is installed on the back lawns of the Academy. Rooted in the rural hinterland of West Bengal, the work pays tribute to clay artisans of Dakshindari and the traditions that continue to shape the city’s cultural fabric. It is an installation that visitors can walk around, spend time with, and experience in relation to the open landscape.
Project Terra-Kolkata
Evenings of Performance Under the Open Sky
The Annual Exhibition extends into live performance, turning the Academy’s lawns into vibrant cultural spaces. Visitors can look forward to:
- Draupadi by Anjana Chandak
- Sharacharu-Chakram, a Sanskrit dance drama by Chidakash Kalalaya Centre for Art and Divinity
- Swar Ranjani, an evening of Khayal-Thumri rendition by Pt. Ajoy Chakrabarty
Scheduled across January evenings, these performances offer an opportunity to experience movement, music, and storytelling alongside visual art.
Sharacharu-Chakram
Why This Exhibition Is Worth Your Time
Whether you are an art enthusiast, a student, or a curious first-time visitor, the 59th Annual Exhibition at Birla Academy offers multiple ways to engage. You can spend an afternoon with Zameen, return for a performance evening, or explore the outdoor installation at your own pace.
At its heart, the exhibition invites visitors to rethink their relationship with land, not as something distant or abstract, but as something deeply personal and shared.
59th Annual Exhibition 2026
Dates: 9 January – 8 February 2026
Venue: Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata
Timings: 3:00 pm – 8:00 pm
(Closed on Mondays and National Holidays)
