The Anatomy of Wonder explores the terrain of dreams, mythologies, fragmented memory, and the subconscious through immersive visual languages, examining how Surrealism continues to evolve beyond its European origins into deeply personal, political, and culturally rooted forms. In a contemporary context marked by displacement, ecological anxiety, digital overload, and fractured identities, surreal visual vocabularies are a means to articulate what cannot be easily expressed. Reframing surrealism as a strategy for reclaiming agency and envisioning alternative futures, the exhibition’s visual narrative seeks to create a space where imagination becomes a critical and transformative force. Ultimately, investigating a pertinent thought: what truths emerge when logic dissolves? What new worlds become possible when dreams are taken seriously?
Reading Surrealism as a response to the widespread devastation caused by the first World War, Andre Breton’s revolutionary Surrealist Manifesto (1924) encouraged fellow artists and thinkers to observe and present the world that went beyond objective reality. Breton is of the opinion, “beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.” (Breton 9). Artists needed to tap into their unconscious, give free rein to their fantasies, to access a super-reality or a “surreality” to make sense of a world that was in shambles.
Rather than presenting Surrealism as a historical movement alone, the exhibition positions “wonder” as a living methodology, a space where fantasy collides with memory, folklore intersects with speculative futures, and hidden emotional realities emerge through symbolic imagery. This exhibition materialises artists’ inner worlds responding to the outer world, in a visual language that would make the viewer question their assumptions about reality, building a space for irrationality within the realm of imagination.
Through distinct yet interconnected investigations of the body, memory, identity, objects, and inherited cultural narratives, the artists interrogate the logical extreme of imagination. Aditya Puthur’s engagement with anatomy, medicine, and biology transforms the human body into a site where scientific knowledge and subjective experience converge, unsettling familiar understandings of life and death. Anikesa Dhing’s vibrant, surreal compositions animate the objects and spaces of everyday life, transforming the familiar into unstable and emotionally charged worlds. Dhiraj Rabha draws upon personal and communal memory, ethnography, and histories of loss and violence to construct archives that challenge fixed narratives of identity and representation. Laxmipriya Panigrahi’s miniature-inspired landscapes merge the painting traditions of Odisha with fantastical environments, creating spaces where the real and imagined coexist. Tito Stanley S. J.’s allegorical paintings negotiate cultural inheritance and belonging, using heightened colour and realism to construct worlds that hover between lived experience and the unfamiliar. Together, these practices expand the possibilities of the surreal beyond the purely subconscious, locating wonder in the body, the everyday, the remembered, the inherited, and the culturally specific.