The Shape of Change: Avatar: Forms of Vishnu and the Ancient Imagination of Transformation.

The modern world likes to believe it invented reinvention.

We have built a culture around the promise of transformation: the new self, the upgraded version, the constant pursuit of becoming something other than what we were. Identity has become fluid, technology reshapes the boundaries of the human, and change itself has become a kind of daily ritual.

But the idea that a being might transform in order to restore balance is far older than our current fascination with reinvention.

More than a millennium before the language of adaptation entered business, science and popular culture, artists across South and Southeast Asia were contemplating one of existence’s most enduring questions:

How does something change its form without losing its essence?

The answer was the avatar.

At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Avatar: Forms of Vishnu brings together almost 200 works spanning more than 1,500 years, tracing the many ways artists have imagined Vishnu and his avatars through sculpture, painting, textiles, jewellery, photography and contemporary installation.

It is an exhibition about mythology, but not mythology as a distant archive of gods and legends.

It is about mythology as a living technology of thought.

A way of examining what it means to preserve, adapt and begin again.

Within Hindu philosophy, Vishnu is associated with preservation - the force that maintains harmony within the cosmos. Yet preservation does not mean resisting change. It requires recognising when transformation becomes necessary.

When the world falls out of balance, Vishnu appears in another form.

The past called. It had a few thoughts about reinvention.

Vishnu’s presence unfolds through a procession of extraordinary embodiments: the fish who carries memory through the flood, the tortoise who supports the turning universe, the boar who retrieves the earth from the depths, the man-lion who exists between categories, the king who embodies moral order, and the teacher whose voice illuminates the complexities of human existence.

Each incarnation responds to a different crisis.

Each form carries a different lesson.

The genius of the avatar is that it refuses the idea of identity as something fixed. The self is not a monument. It is a living process, shaped by circumstance, memory and necessity.

In that sense, the ancient concept feels unexpectedly close to the anxieties of the present. We inhabit a period defined by enormous transitions: ecological uncertainty, technological upheaval, shifting ideas of belonging and selfhood. The question of how to adapt without losing our humanity has become one of the defining concerns of our age.

The artists represented in Avatar: Forms of Vishnu understood this long ago.

Among the exhibition’s earliest works are remarkable sculptures from Cambodia’s pre-Angkor and early Angkor periods, including a sixth-century representation of Krishna lifting Mount Govardhana.

The story is familiar: a storm threatens the village, and Krishna raises the mountain above the people, creating a shelter beneath it.

But the image contains a more subtle idea of heroism.

Krishna does not conquer the storm.

He does not demonstrate power through destruction.

He absorbs the burden.

The mountain is no longer a symbol of conquest, but of custodianship - a weight willingly borne, a landscape transformed into refuge, and a quiet reminder that the deepest form of strength is not the ability to stand above others, but the willingness to stand for them.

It is a radically different vision of strength - one based not on domination, but protection. The hero is not the figure standing above everyone else. The hero is the one willing to stand beneath the weight of the world.

Another extraordinary Cambodian work depicts Vishnu reclining upon the cosmic serpent, with Brahma emerging as creation begins. It is one of the oldest and most poetic images in the exhibition, capturing a universe that emerges not from chaos or force, but from a state of profound stillness.

There is something quietly challenging about this idea.

Modern culture often equates movement with progress. We celebrate speed, productivity and constant activity. Yet this ancient image proposes that creation itself may begin in silence.

Before the universe moves, it dreams.

Before there is action, there is imagination.

This tension between stillness and transformation runs throughout the exhibition, particularly in the way historical works are placed alongside contemporary responses.

Avatar: Forms of Vishnu does not treat tradition as something preserved in amber. Instead, it reveals a tradition that has always been in motion - carried across languages, landscapes and generations.

The stories of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, central to the exhibition’s themes, have never existed as a single fixed version. They have travelled through oral storytelling, temple carvings, manuscripts, theatre, dance and painting, continually absorbing new interpretations.

They survive because they change.

They endure because each generation finds itself reflected within them.

This becomes particularly evident in Sumakshi Singh’s new installation Threshold, created from woven cotton and silk and inspired by the architecture of the 12th-century Sun Temple at Konark and the story of Narasimha.

The work explores a moment of emergence - the space between one state and another.

A threshold is a place of uncertainty. It is neither arrival nor departure. It is the instant before transformation becomes visible.

Much of human experience exists in this territory: between old identities and new ones, between endings and beginnings, between what we understand and what we are still learning to accept.

Singh’s work suggests that transformation is not always dramatic.

Sometimes it happens quietly.

Sometimes it begins almost invisibly.

Delhi-based artist Pushpamala N brings another important perspective through her photographic reinterpretation of Sita, the central female figure of the Ramayana.

By positioning herself within the unfolding mythology, she explores the ways narratives have shaped collective understandings of womanhood, devotion and moral expectation. Rather than passively inheriting the epic tradition, she turns a critical gaze upon it - questioning who has been granted the authority to preserve and interpret these stories, and which perspectives have been overlooked, silenced or pushed to the periphery.

This is why mythology remains powerful.

It is never only about the past.

It is a conversation between generations.

A story becomes timeless not because it never changes, but because it continues to be questioned.

The exhibition’s contemporary artists continue this process of renewal. Kalam Patua’s Kalighat paintings, depicting Vishnu’s avatars, are brought into dialogue with animation and digital technology, extending an artistic tradition that has always embraced new methods of storytelling.

The medium changes.

The impulse remains.

The earliest sculptors, painters and storytellers were not simply preserving myths. They were making them relevant to their own moment.

The artists of today are doing the same.

Perhaps this is the deepest lesson of Avatar: Forms of Vishnu: that the ancient and contemporary are not opposites. They are connected by the same human desire to understand change.

These stories endure because they speak to experiences that never disappear.

The fear of disorder.

The hope for renewal.

The search for balance.

The belief that even when the world shifts beyond recognition, something meaningful can still emerge.

The avatar does not promise that we can remain unchanged.

It offers something far more honest: That transformation itself may be the most enduring part of being human.

Avatar: Forms of Vishnu is on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 20 June to October 2026.

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Words and photo by AW.