Grip, Hold, Pin, on view at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) in Bengaluru, reimagines Indian wrestling as a cultural and artistic subject rather than merely a sport. Bringing together historical objects, Ragamala paintings, textiles, and photography by artists including Jyoti Bhatt, Raghu Rai, T.S. Satyan, Indrajit Khambe, and Prarthna Singh, the exhibition explores how wrestling intersects with community, labour, identity, gender, and tradition.
What does wrestling look like when you stop watching it as a sport?
That's the question at the center of Grip, Hold, Pin, a new exhibition at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) in Bengaluru, on view at the Infosys Foundation Gallery from August 15 to November 1. Rather than treating Indian wrestling as an athletic subject to be documented, the show approaches it as something artists have been recording for centuries even before a camera ever entered an akhara. Ragamala paintings, textile labels, and historical objects sit alongside modern and contemporary photography, tracing how wrestling has stood in for community, labour, identity, and the body itself.
The exhibition deliberately avoids a linear timeline. Miniatures, nals, and joris are placed in dialogue with photographic works, letting ideas about strength, gender, discipline, and spectacle sit next to each other across eras rather than in sequence. The effect is an argument, that a practice sustained in neighbourhood akharas for generations, and woven deep into India's mythology and visual culture, has rarely been given the space of a museum, despite shaping stories of aspiration and belonging for so long.
Alongside work from Jyoti Bhatt, the late Raghu Rai, and T.S. Satyan, the show brings in contemporary photographers Indrajit Khambe and Prarthna Singh — neither interested in wrestling as spectacle. Khambe's images sit inside the discipline and community that surround the sport. His hope is for the photographs to preserve not just the physical act, but the cultural world that keeps it alive.
Singh's contribution draws from Champion, her decade-long series on women wrestlers, extending the exhibition's focus past the mat entirely. "I'm interested in the lives, aspirations and quiet resilience of the women I photograph," she says, describing sport as "a space for identity, possibility and change." She hopes the work lets viewers locate strength somewhere beyond the ring — in the everyday acts of courage that rarely get photographed at all.
Grip, Hold, Pin is interested in asking the slower questions: what a museum chooses to preserve, how photography shapes what gets remembered, and how a practice this old keeps finding new form through the people still living inside it. Wrestling, the show argues, was never only a sport — it's a cultural language that's been evolving in plain sight all along.
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