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The Long Now of Us: Jagannath Panda Returns to Bhubaneswar with a Defining Solo
- Style Essentials Edit Team
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
There is a different weight to an artist returning home, especially when the work arrives carrying three decades of practice. The Long Now of Us, a solo exhibition by Jagannath Panda, curated by Sibdas Sengupta, marks Panda’s first solo presentation in his hometown of Bhubaneswar. Opening at Lalit Kala Akademi, Regional Centre, the exhibition frames this homecoming not as nostalgia, but as a measured re-engagement with place, memory, and time.
Presented by EO Odisha, The Long Now of Us resists the format of a conventional retrospective. Instead of moving chronologically, the exhibition revisits Panda’s evolving visual language through recurrence and return. Paintings, drawings, and large-scale sculptural installations come together to form a landscape where past and present overlap, echoing a cyclical understanding of time drawn from Odia literary thought, particularly the writings of Gopinath Mohanty.
Panda’s practice has long moved between figuration and abstraction, architecture and ecology, myth and urban reality. In this exhibition, those strands appear layered rather than separated. His surfaces are dense, assembled through collage, not merely as a technique, but as a way of thinking. Encyclopaedia fragments, printed matter, architectural references, and brocade fabrics are pulled out of context and reassembled, allowing multiple meanings to coexist. History is not illustrated here; it circulates.
One of the exhibition’s central motifs is the chariot, reimagined not as a sacred object or historical symbol, but as a fragile structure in motion. In Panda’s work, the chariot becomes a site of accumulation and collapse, carrying traces of social life, belief, and rupture. These sculptural forms sit alongside works that draw from the gestural logic of Odissi dance, translated into visual rhythms that suggest regeneration rather than permanence.
Key works such as Alchemist of the Earth III introduce the idea of spectacle as a filter through which reality is processed. Vision, Panda suggests, is never neutral. It is shaped by history, power, and environment. The works carry a quiet urgency, engaging with ecological precarity without slipping into overt activism or didacticism.
What gives The Long Now of Us its particular resonance is its setting. Bringing this body of work to Bhubaneswar is not simply symbolic. Both Panda and Sengupta see the exhibition as part of a larger cultural intervention, one that addresses the need for sustained contemporary art discourse beyond metropolitan centres. The exhibition gestures toward pedagogy, dialogue, and infrastructure, rather than a single moment of display.
Sengupta describes the exhibition as occupying a space between ethical return and speculative risk, acknowledging that the past does not conclude neatly, and that the future remains under construction. That tension runs quietly through the exhibition, visible in its materials, forms, and pacing.
The exhibition is accompanied by a public programme that extends its concerns beyond the gallery. A panel discussion titled The Cyclical Return brings together Premjish Achari, Pradosh Mishra, and Jagannath Panda in conversation, moderated by Sibdas Sengupta. The closing day will feature a discussion around Jagannath Panda: Jibana, Darsana abang Kathabali, a forthcoming publication by Ramakanta Samantaray. A scholarly catalogue with curatorial and guest texts will also be released.
For Bhubaneswar, The Long Now of Us arrives not as a spectacle, but as a sustained pause, an invitation to sit with an artist whose work continues to ask how history lingers, how materials remember, and how the present carries unfinished pasts within it.
Exhibition Details
Preview: 13 February 2026 | 5:00 pm onwards
Exhibition Dates: 14 – 27 February 2026
Timings: 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
Venue: Lalit Kala Akademi, Regional Centre, Bhubaneswar
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