Bengal Biennale

Filmmaker, producer, designer, visual artist and photographer. She has worked as a production designer on over 15 feature films and art directed The Darjeeling Limited, London Has Fallen and The Bourne Supremacy. Seth produced A Suitable Boy, a television series for BBC, airing on Netflix. She has directed 20 documentary films including DAM/AGE, A film with Arundhati Roy, DRAWING IN METAL and a BBC Omnibus on Vikram Seth.

As an artist and photographer, she has had solo shows at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai; Sunapranta, Goa and Deeya, Paris. Her work has been exhibited at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; Grosvenor Gallery, London; Vadehra Art Gallery, Instituto Italiano de Cultura and Khoj, New Delhi.

Her art installations include a recycled mudskipper for Giz, and an enchanted forest for Hermes.

Her ongoing public art project, The Merchant of Images, has travelled widely in India and abroad. Throughout her career, she has paid detailed attention to the visual language of the everyday locale, documenting hand-painted signs in India and collaborating with fellow artists to recreate vernacular expressions on film sets and art galleries alike. Her book SADAK. Hand painted street signs in India (Humboldt Books, 2023), showcases a part of Aradhana Seth’s archive photographed over the past few decades.

Sadak: Jaile Baire (The Jail and the World)

In this exhibition, the Alipore Central Jail, now a museum, transforms into a palimpsest of fragmented memories and resonant absences. Aradhana Seth’s photographs transform the Indian street into a stage for stories of everyday life and memory, dissolving the hierarchies between ‘high’ and ‘low’ arts. Once a site of colonial incarceration for leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Chandra Bose, the jail becomes a space where Seth’s photographic fragments serve as ‘breadcrumbs’ guiding visitors through a reflective journey. Much like the trail left by Hansel and Gretel in the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale, these images seem innocuous at first, but they gradually lead to a profound reckoning with the past. Seth’s work invites this shift in perspective, mirroring how history itself becomes clearer when viewed through the lens of reflection.

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