Artists break forced silence
At Delhi Art Week, galleries turn Bikaner House into a fierce defence of fading ecological history
Have societies completely lost the ability to comprehend the shifting winds and the erased histories of the natural world? The crisis of a collapsing climate and the forced silence surrounding marginalised botanical knowledge suddenly break through the noise. This thematic reckoning anchors the ninth edition of Delhi Contemporary Art Week.
Across the halls of Bikaner House, audiences come face to face with the physical reality of a broken environment in Bye-Bye Monsoon. Curated by Adwait Singh, this segment pulls from Amitav Ghosh’s documentation of a freak 1978 Delhi tornado to map a broader ecological collapse, connecting global oceanic breakdowns directly to the changing monsoons hitting the subcontinent. The conversation then moves fluidly into Annalisa Mansukhani’s This Animate Earth. Here, the focus shifts to the complex relationships between plants, caste and empire. The exhibition raises difficult questions about how local communities can possibly protect their rooted histories when the ground they stand on remains so fiercely divided by old power structures.
Instead of surrendering to these challenges, the creators push back. They reclaim botany from a heavily gendered past where women’s deep ecological fieldwork was written off as polite domestic decoration. As you walk through the rooms hosted by Blueprint12, Exhibit 320, Gallery Espace, Latitude 28, Shrine Empire and Vadehra Art Gallery, the raw physical toll of their work is obvious. The artists grab hold of discarded archival scraps, roots and bare earth, moulding them into blunt, tactile records of our shared loss. Taking it all in, the afternoon completely stops feeling like a predictable commercial showcase. It becomes a fierce, deeply felt response. It shows us that even when left with almost zero stage to stand on, these artists outright refuse the forced silence, making absolutely sure our oldest ecological memories stay wide awake.
