Two Exhibition-Seasons, One Question: What Does It Mean to Know?
June 25, 2026
There is a particular kind of question that stops you mid-bite, mid-thought, mid-breath. The kind that carries no clear answer you can look up. The kind that sits with you, at the dinner table, in the laboratory, and on the commute home.
At Science Gallery Bengaluru (SGB), those are exactly the questions we build our exhibition-seasons around.
As a not-for-profit institution for research-based engagement, SGB is India’s only and Asia’s first Science Gallery, established in Sanjaynagar, Bengaluru, with the founding support of the Government of Karnataka and academic partners including Indian Institute of Science (IISc), and National Centre for Biological Studies (NCBS).
We have spent the past few years observing visitors and participants, walking into SGB and encountering art and science on their own terms. This is also where our larger ambition lives: to build, in Bengaluru, a public institution for the twenty-first century, where curiosity is treated as a civic resource rather than a private pursuit, and knowledge as a public good. As we close one of our most ambitious exhibition-seasons, here is what our practice looks like.
A Breakdown of What We Do
Each year, SGB organises a year-long exhibition-season built around art-science collaboration. If you have ever found yourself wondering what plant life might tell us about our relationship with the natural world (PHYTOPIA), what the science of the mind reveals about how societies govern emotion and experience (PSYCHE), how epidemics travel across bodies and borders (CONTAGION), or what our cities are made of when you look closely at the science embedded in everyday life (Sci560 – Science in the City), you have been asking the kinds of questions our exhibition-seasons have been built around. From the Falling Walls Foundation in Berlin, to the Wellbeing Summit in Bilbao, and the University of Glasgow, our exhibition-seasons have reached well beyond Bengaluru and have been featured in The Economist, The Lancet, and Physics Today.
Launched in August 2025, CALORIE: The Breakdown explores humanity’s intimate and often fraught relationship with food: how it has been shaped by history, society, governance, and science. What began as a thermodynamic unit became something far more consequential: a tool of governance that has shaped agricultural policy, healthcare frameworks, and poverty indices across the world.
Alongside each exhibition-season, SGB runs a full programme of public engagement. These take the form of lectures, participatory workshops, performances, and extend into our annual film festival and our food festival, Namma Oota. We continually undertake research-led initiatives, one such being our focus on the Anthropocene reflected in Milk Matters and River Landscapes.
The Gallery is a mediated space. Our Mediators and Experimentors, who become the face of the Gallery, undergo extensive training with artists and researchers, developing skills in critical thinking, cross-disciplinary communication, and public engagement. This form of mentorship-led initiative is realised through school walkthroughs (Student Learning Modules), guided visits, and themed walkthroughs like Anna CALORIE-ina: The Literary in CALORIE, or The CALORIE Footprint: From Plate to Planet, offering a new lens to continually reinterpret an exhibition-season.
Learning at SGB continues long after an exhibition-season comes to a close. Offering a new pedagogical approach with a focus on non-formal and informal learning, our Learning Resources, made by young adults, for young adults, including Exhibition-in-a-box, Open Courseware modules, and Activity Handbooks, remain freely accessible online. These document the scope of each season in full, with online components designed to extend the exhibition well beyond its physical walls. These resources also reflect our commitment to public education, and to expand the existing knowledge commons.
CALORIE has taught us something important. When you give people a familiar entry point, something as universal as food, and then open up its histories and complexities, they often arrive at unfamiliar places. We find visitors, learners and educators alike, leaving with questions they did not walk in with. That, for us, is the measure of a season well built.
More than a Gallery!
As a public space for knowledge, our work is not limited around an exhibition-season. We believe daring questions that advance the frontiers of knowledge need unfettered exploration of the unknown. Committed to shaping culture, we want to foreground research-led curiosity. Our Public Lab Complex (PLC), built around the proposition that research should not remain confined to academic institutions, creates space for unusual questions, and open-ended collaborations. Housing five experimental spaces, SGB has built and is building an institutional infrastructure that can support Open Research for the future, while cultivating a network of researchers across fields of knowledge. Our efforts are guided by a framework for intergenerational co-inquiry through interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration.
An Invitation to Follow the Questions
Building from our learnings, we are now exploring Quantum science as a cultural, historical, and technological force that shapes how we understand the world today.
Quantum begins with one of the most celebrated thought experiments in science: a cat, a box, a radioactive particle, and the question of whether something can exist in more than one state simultaneously until the moment it is observed. It is a provocation that has long refused to stay in the laboratory.
We are now living through what many scientists describe as a second quantum revolution. Principles established in the last century are actively becoming the foundation for a new generation of technologies, across the field of quantum computing, navigation, sensing and metrology. These are active frontiers, with laboratory investments, industry races, and real questions about who will shape them and who will benefit.
QUANTUM will bring these questions into public conversation. Consistent with SGB’s approach, the exhibition will explore science alongside its implications for how knowledge is produced, who has access to it, and what changes when we look.
As an institution that is committed to building a community around science and actively shaping young minds to be able to participate in better informed public discourse, SGB represents a model that is both well-established and still being built. We welcome the Indiaspora community to follow our work, visit when in Bengaluru, and consider how SGB might be part of the conversations you are already having.
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed about our programmes, exhibitions, and online engagements ahead of QUANTUM’s opening. Our programmes channel, and exhibition archives are freely accessible online, for anyone who wants to revisit a season or encounter it for the first time, wherever they happen to be. If you would like to remain connected or get involved, we would be glad to hear from you.
Science Gallery Bengaluru is India’s only and Asia’s first Science Gallery, a not-for-profit public institution at Sanjaynagar, Bengaluru. SGB was established with the founding support of the Government of Karnataka and academic partners Indian Institute of Science (IISc), and National Centre for Biological Studies (NCBS). It works at the intersection of science, art, and society to engage young adults through immersive exhibitions, public programmes, and mentorship.
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Gallery Timings: Wednesday–Thursday: 10 AM – 6 PM | Friday–Sunday: 10 AM – 8 PM | Closed Monday–Tuesday
