Pariah Interactive animated Chitra Ganesh's Inanna myth
Journey to the Great Below retells the world's oldest recorded story in six minutes of moving image, at BALTIC's Level 4 through Jan. 17, 2027.
The oldest story on record now moves at film speed. Journey to the Great Below, the centerpiece of Chitra Ganesh's exhibition at BALTIC in Gateshead, is a 6-minute-34-second animation retelling the Descent of Inanna, in which the Sumerian goddess of love, fecundity and war walks into the underworld to face Ereshkigal. In BALTIC's interview with the artist, Ganesh dates the poem to between 2300 and 1700 B.C., ties it to Enheduanna, the first poet to sign a name, and says the draw was that “the first writer and the first story actually centered women.” In a video Ganesh posted, the artist lingers on the detail that organizes the whole work: in Sumerian culture “the ear was associated with wisdom,” the channel through which cosmic truths arrived. Hearing the call from the Great Below is what begins the descent.
Inside Journey to the Great Below at BALTIC (excerpt from the museum’s exhibition video, muted). Watch in full with sound.
The animation was developed with and animated by Pariah Interactive, a games and XR studio split between Brooklyn and New Delhi whose in-house project is the 3D platformer 1000 Deaths, with sound design by Panosophy. The show is Ganesh's first major solo exhibition in a UK public institution, and it stages the poem in real space. Visitors enter through monumental gates, the first a semicircle modeled on coins and seals of the period, and Ganesh counts more portals inside the animation itself. Two new sculptures draw on artifacts held by the British Museum and the Met: The Descent, a pair of feet coming down a spiral staircase, and Cosmic Eye, modeled on Mesopotamian lapis eyes, with a video of growth and decay playing inside it. A site-specific wall drawing picks up the same imagery.
One little detail we liked: a seal carved out of wax. Seal carving, Ganesh says, is “one of the earliest known image making processes” and probably the first way of producing multiples, which matters to an artist who thinks in “reproducible and mass mediated images,” from print to comics to film. Handing the oldest story to a games studio extends that line by one more medium.
It occupies Level 4 through January 17, 2027.
Journey to the Great Below at BALTIC: the installation, Ganesh at work on the wall drawing, and the votive figure up close. Courtesy BALTIC.
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