Sarnath Banerjee's new exhibition, Badly Remembered Things, arrives as both retrospective and experiment: a distillation of roughly 30 years of artistic thinking presented not as a closed chronology, but as an open field of associations. Rather than asking viewers to simply observe finished works, the exhibition builds its narrative in collaboration with them, turning memory itself into the central medium.
The premise is deceptively simple. Banerjee, one of India's most recognisable contemporary visual storytellers, has long worked at the intersection of comics, illustration, literature and installation. In this exhibition, those strands are not merely displayed; they are reassembled into a world where meaning emerges through recall, misremembering and interpretation. The title signals the method. These are not pristine recollections but fragments, distortions and afterimages, assembled into a structure that depends on the audience to make it whole.
Memory As Material
The exhibition's strongest idea is that memory is not a private archive sealed inside the mind, but a social and unstable material that changes depending on who is handling it. Banerjee's work has often explored the city as a place of layered histories, half-erased landmarks and personal mythologies, and Badly Remembered Things extends that inquiry into the exhibition form itself. Visitors are not passive recipients of a narrative; they are asked to supply connections, recognise echoes and negotiate the distance between what is shown and what is remembered.
That approach gives the show a distinctly contemporary relevance. In an era saturated with images, archives and algorithmic recall, the question is no longer whether something can be preserved, but how it is reassembled, interpreted and emotionally charged. Banerjee's exhibition resists the clean logic of documentation. Instead, it privileges uncertainty, suggesting that the most durable stories are often the ones that survive in altered form.
The result is a body of work that feels less like a museum-style survey and more like a conversation with the artist's own past. Across the span of three decades, Banerjee has developed a visual language that is witty, literate and quietly philosophical. Badly Remembered Things appears to compress that evolution into a single experiential frame, allowing older concerns to surface in new combinations rather than in chronological order.
A Collaborative Narrative
What distinguishes the exhibition is its insistence that narrative is co-authored. Banerjee does not present a singular, authoritative account of events or ideas. Instead, he creates conditions in which the viewer's own memory, associations and blind spots become part of the work. That makes the exhibition less about looking back than about the instability of looking itself.
This is a significant move for an artist whose practice has often been rooted in storytelling. In graphic novels and visual essays alike, Banerjee has explored how stories are built from fragments, omissions and subjective viewpoints. Here, that sensibility is expanded into space. The viewer's movement through the exhibition becomes part of the reading process, and the act of remembering becomes inseparable from the act of interpreting.
Such an approach also reflects a broader shift in contemporary art, where exhibitions increasingly seek to dissolve the boundary between artwork and audience. But Banerjee's version is notably restrained and intelligent. Rather than relying on spectacle, it trusts the complexity of memory and the intelligence of the viewer. The exhibition's power lies in its refusal to over-explain itself.
Banerjee's Enduring Reach
Over three decades, Banerjee has built a practice that has helped expand the possibilities of Indian visual culture. His work has moved fluidly between page and wall, text and image, humour and melancholy, often using the city as a stage on which private and public histories collide. Badly Remembered Things consolidates that range while also revealing how persistent his central concerns remain.
The exhibition matters not only as a marker of longevity, but as evidence of artistic continuity in a field where formats and audiences are constantly changing. Banerjee's work has always depended on the reader or viewer to complete it, but this exhibition makes that dependence explicit. It asks what happens when memory is treated not as evidence, but as collaboration.
That question gives Badly Remembered Things its force. It is an exhibition about recollection, but also about the limits of recollection; about the stories we inherit, but also the ones we unknowingly supply. In Banerjee's hands, the gaps are not failures to be corrected. They are the very space in which art, and meaning, can occur.