Thukral & Tagra’s ‘Sustaina India’ trains the spotlight on climate change

Can art do more than build awareness around climate change? Delhi exhibition Sustaina India would like to find out

British Columbia in Canada is home to temperate coastal rainforests, some of the oldest growths of their kind on the planet. When Manjot Kaur, a contemporary artist who spends her time between Chandigarh and Vancouver, began to make excursions there some years ago, she was struck anew by the greenery.

“I was born in Ludhiana, a very industrial, urban town in Punjab,” says Kaur, one of three selected fellows at Sustaina India, a unique new art exhibition with a focus on raising climate awareness, at Bikaner House in New Delhi. “I lived in Vancouver for two years, and as soon as I started to venture into the forest, I realised that it was not just trees. We are in symbiosis with them, there is reciprocity.”

Kaur’s observations have manifested in The Parliament of Forests, a video installation that seeks to highlight the idea of nature having rights of its own. “The goal of this project is to think about personhood for forests,” says the artist, who is inspired by the work of French philosopher Bruno Latour, American feminist academic Donna Harroway, and American eco-feminist Carolyn Merchant, among others.

Sustaina India’s first art exhibition is the result of 18 months of conversations between the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a New Delhi-based think tank, and the multi-disciplinary artists Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra. Born from the alarming research-based observation that eight out of 10 Indians now reside in districts vulnerable to extreme climate events, CEEW sought to fill the blank spaces between policy, awareness and on-ground implementation through artistic practice.

For this, they reached out to Thukral & Tagra who have, since the pandemic, been putting together climate change-oriented Game Plays — like board games, says Tagra “but another take on how to engage with people and communities, without any tech involved”.

In another room of Bikaner House, stands a part-mud, part-cement wall — artist Debasmita Ghosh’s Living With The Land, an art installation that tracks the after-effects of switching from mud to industrial material for building houses in the Kondh community of Orissa.  

Ghosh, who first ventured into this tribe’s hamlet in 2018, knew there was not going to be any solutions or answers to the questions she was asking the community. “What we wanted to show was the process and the journey that the women of the community are taking: the impact, the transitions, their feelings about it — how this impacted different aspects of their lives.”