Experimenter Gallery

Experimenter is a contemporary art gallery in Kolkata, India, co-founded by Priyanka and Prateek Raja in 2009. Functioning as an incubator for ambitious and challenging contemporary practice, the gallery represents critical artists from across the globe and operates across multiple disciplines and media. Recognized as a pace-setter for the South Asian region, its programming extends beyond exhibition-making to encompass knowledge creation through talks, performances, workshops, and educational initiatives. The gallery currently operates two spaces in Kolkata and a third location in Mumbai.

Experimenter opened in 2009, born from Prateek Raja's long-held ambition to establish a cutting-edge gallery and Priyanka Raja's decision to leave her media manager career to realize the vision. The couple spent a year meeting artists and plotting the venture before launching the original Hindustan Road space in Kolkata. On February 28, 2018, the gallery expanded with a second, more ambitious location at Ballygunge Place in Kolkata. In 2022, Experimenter established its third space, Experimenter Colaba, in Mumbai, committing its discursive programming to a city representing the diverse pluralities of the region. The gallery won the Frieze London Stand Prize in 2023.

The gallery's program is rooted in dialogue and dissent, seeking to expand the scope of contemporary practice beyond the conventional white cube format and the expected role of a gallery. It represents a diverse, intergenerational roster of international artists working across various media, including photography, painting, sculpture, video, and sound art. The gallery frequently stages debut solo exhibitions for its artists and organizes conceptually rigorous group shows that explore specific formal or thematic resonances, such as the meditative use of grids, mark-making, and erasure, or the conceptual use of sound as a thought-form and vector for memory.

Experimenter represents numerous significant contemporary artists, including Adip Dutta, Ayesha Sultana, Bani Abidi, Biraaj Dodiya, CAMP, Julien Segard, Kanishka Raja, Krishna Reddy, Mehreen Murtaza, Moyra Davey, Naeem Mohaiemen, Prabhakar Pachpute, Praneet Soi, Radhika Khimji, Rathin Barman, Raqs Media Collective, Sahil Naik, Sakshi Gupta, Samson Young, Sanchayan Ghosh, Sohrab Hura, and Soumya Sankar Bose. Notable exhibitions include Tino Sehgal's first solo in India, This Situation, in 2011, and the four-part retrospective series As if by CAMP in 2015. In 2023, the exhibition In Between the Notes explored sound as a thought-form through works by Lala Rukh, Parul Thacker, and Samson Young, among others. For its 16th anniversary in 2025, the gallery organized Artists for Artists, a program where roster artists selected peers for solo exhibitions, featuring Aishwarya Arumbakkam, Sathish Kumar, Rupali Patil, and Rai.

The gallery's original site is located on Hindustan Road in Kolkata, established in 2009. A second Kolkata location, Experimenter Ballygunge Place, opened on February 28, 2018, with the inaugural exhibition I Wish to Let You Fall off My Hands, Chapter II. Both Kolkata spaces operate simultaneously, allowing for dialogues across practices and spaces, as demonstrated in the 2018 exhibition Drawn from Practice. In 2022, the gallery expanded to Mumbai with Experimenter Colaba. Additionally, the Experimenter Outpost program, initiated in 2019, temporarily inhabits disused and characterful spaces outside the physical galleries, such as the Alipore Museum in Kolkata, for iterative exhibitions.

Experimenter operates three permanent spaces: Experimenter Hindustan Road and Experimenter Ballygunge Place in Kolkata, and Experimenter Colaba in Mumbai. The gallery maintains a robust international presence, participating in leading global art fairs including Art Basel in Basel since 2013, Art Basel in Hong Kong since 2014, Frieze London since 2010, Frieze New York since 2012, FIAC Paris from 2016 to 2018, and Art Dubai and India Art Fair since 2011. Beyond exhibitions, the gallery fosters public access to discourse through the Experimenter Curators' Hub, an annual curatorial intensive started in 2012, the Experimenter Learning Program established in 2018, and Experimenter Labs, a multi-dimensional online platform launched in 2020. Its publishing wing, Experimenter Books, founded in 2016, produces artist-books and monographs, and offers free online access to its annual catalogues and the Experimenter Labs Reader.