Exhibition Review: Manthan by Anisha Sanghani

Kamalnayan Bajaj Art Gallery, Mumbai | December 1–6, 2025

When we say earth, we unconsciously refer to only 29% of the surface. Because that is land and that's where we, homo sapience, inhabit. But the fact is, the larger part of the mother earth is covered by water, not land. To top it all, when we talk about climate change, most of the time we think of what is going on in the half of the atmosphere above the ground. We forget that in absence of the ocean, the difference in temperature between the tropic and the pole would be 110 °C. And the artist has addressed this often brushed aside issue in her exhibition of paintings.

Anisha Sanghani’s solo exhibition Manthan marks her powerful debut in India, bringing together myth, ecology, and contemporary urgency in a strikingly visceral way. Rooted in the ancient tale of Samudra Manthan, Sanghani reimagines the cosmic churning not as a source of divine treasures but as a grim allegory of human negligence, where oceans yield plastic, toxins, and irreversible loss. Her mixed-media canvases, lush and seductive in technique, lure viewers into scenes of beauty before confronting them with the brutality of ecological collapse—fish entangled in bottles, turtles navigating surreal mounds of refuse, and gods recoiling from the poisoned churn.

The exhibition’s emotional force is heightened by Sanghani’s own performative experiments, in which she submerged herself with her face encased in plastic to embody the suffocating plight of marine creatures. This act transforms her art into testimony, a haunting reminder of the terror inflicted on the ocean’s inhabitants. As Sanghani herself notes, “Art cannot clean the oceans, but it can remind us of what they mean to us.”

Manthan thus becomes more than an exhibition—it is a moral mirror, urging viewers to confront their complicity and begin their own inner churning toward awareness, responsibility, and renewal. Sanghani’s work resonates as both devotion and desecration, beauty and unease, leaving audiences with questions that demand reckoning: What are we taking from the ocean? What are we giving back? And what future will surface if we fail to act?