15 years of fearless exhibition-making at Experimenter

Prateek and Priyanka Raja have created spaces for diverse practices and politically charged art that appeals to all

- Avantika Bhuyan

An octopus. That’s how Priyanka Raja, co-founder of the contemporary arts gallery, Experimenter, sees the space she and her co-founder Prateek Raja have nurtured over the past 15 years. “One head and many arms—even though we work across multiple galleries and different kinds of programming, the vision remains the same,” she explains.

As the gallery, with three spaces in Kolkata and Mumbai, completed 15 years in 2023, Priyanka and Prateek are busy with an array of exhibitions that embody the ethos of Experimenter—to have a politically charged programme, democratise art and show diverse practices.

As part of the ongoing Mumbai Gallery Weekend (on till 14 January), Experimenter has chosen to come out of the white cube space by showing art collective CAMP’s seven-channel installation, Bombay Tilts Down, at the Sassoon Docks. Presented in collaboration with St+art India and supported by the Mumbai Port Authority, the experimental film was created during the covid-19 pandemic, with six CCTV cameras perched atop a 35-floor building on E Moses Road, Mumbai, to descend into vertical landscapes, filled with unfinished construction and sprawling haphazard settlements.

Within its Colaba gallery, which opened in 2022, the gallerists are showcasing a shift in artist Sohrab Hura’s practice with Ghosts In My Sleep, on view till 16 March. Practising photographer Hura is presenting an entirely new language—works on paper made with gouache and pastel drawings based on the short film, Bittersweet. It shows the artist’s continuing engagement with images, albeit in a different vocabulary and medium. This exhibition also highlights the gallery’s long relationships with artists; they first showed Hura’s work in 2017.