"Banaras" The Sacred Ghats

The Ghats of Varanasi are not only physical sites along the river but living metaphors of time, memory, and transcendence. They embody the rhythm of daily life — where rituals, devotion, and human presence merge with the eternal flow of the Ganga. To stand before them is to witness the fragile coexistence of silence and sound, permanence and impermanence, history and the present.

This exhibition brings together a wide range of contemporary artistic practices that respond to the l ayered atmospheres of the Ghats. Manish Sharma transforms the symbolic presence of the river into a boat instal l ation that converses with his paintings, while Mukesh Shah’s mixed-medi a explorations weave together texture and memory to reflect the city’s shifting moods. Vinay Sharma works with self-made ink on paper also he has used some wintage document paper of Banaras, grounding his images in the very materiality of the pl ace. The multil ayered compositions of Manash Jena capture the density and rhythm of the riverfront, just as Soumen Saha, Paramesh Paul , and Dipankar Chanda immerse themselves in the city’s daily cycles, attentive to every ritual and detail. The exhibition also presents Trupti Joshi’s conceptual and minimal approach, which emphasizes space and silence, alongside the striking use of geometric forms in the compositions of Vivek Nimbolkar and Anand Bekwad, Artists Sanj ay N. Raut and Sukanta Das each have their own distinctive style of expressing subjects rooted in Indian mythology.

Together, these artists — drawn from across Indi a — bring forward a plural vision of Banaras, revealing the Ghats not as static monuments but as living passages between the sacred and the everyday, the personal and the col lective, the transient and the timeless. Their works demonstrate that Varanasi, the oldest living city in the world, continues to inspire both reverence and reinvention.

This exhibition is not only an assembly of artworks but also an invitation to enter the spirit of the Ghats — to experience them as spaces where tradition and experimentation meet, where devotion merges with imagination, and where the eternal flow of the Ganga carries both memory and possibility.

: R a v i T h a k u r