In the spotlight: Art practices rooted in the land and its people

At first glance, Kulpreet Singh’s Extinction Archive stands out for its intricacy. The 40-year-old Patiala-based artist draws likenesses of endangered or extinct beetles, amphibians, birds, fungal and plant species on laser-cut rice paper to the minutest detail. As you go closer, the magnitude of the crisis underlying this large-scale installation creeps up on you. Since 2022, Singh has been studying the International Union for Conservation’s ‘Red List of Threatened Species’ to create a memorial to the social and ecological violence on the land. To signify the loss of species, he creates fossilised silhouettes around the flora and fauna. “Where fields once existed, flood waters have washed away the farmland and left behind sand. I have also researched riverlines, where waters have receded or simply disappeared. Extinction is not just about loss of a particular species but an entire ecosystem,” says Singh.

Meanwhile at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture in Kolkata, you can see broken bricks lying scattered on the floor. Birender Yadav’s Debris of Fate alludes to the invisibilised labour of migrant workers, who leave their farmlands behind. Yadav makes their presence felt through images of tools, handprints and gestures on bricks. This work is part of Zameen, a group show curated by Ina Puri, and on view till 8 February. Yadav’s installation, Only the Earth Knows their Labour can also be seen at the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale, where he represents the details of a migrant’s life through tools, clothes and trunks moulded in clay.

In recent years, young artists have responded to the complexities of the land and its inhabitants in their work. Hailing from the very soil and communities that they talk about, their work acquires deeply personal and powerful narratives. Work on ecology and environment is no longer confined to the monolith theme of the climate crisis. Instead, these artists are looking at specific issues such as soil quality, farmer’s rights, the land that migrants leave behind, the significance of weeds in the broader ecosystem, and more. Where there were a niche set of artists like Ravi Agarwal, Prabhakar Pachpute and Arunkumar HG investigating labour, capital and changing ecologies, this is now a rising community of young voices like Singh, Yadav, Sidhant Kumar, Deepak Kumar and Umesh S and Gyanwant Yadav. Shunning labels like “artist-activist”, these practitioners are creating works inspired by what they have borne witness to. In fact, according to Puri, the reason works in Zameen have had such a powerful impact is because each artist has explored themes of land as inheritance, resource, memory, and contested ground from a personal lens.

A greater number of grants, commissions and awards are recognising the pertinence of their work and the themes that they tackle. Singh’s Extinction Archive, for instance, has been commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art as an outdoor installation at the India Art Fair 2026. Sidhant Kumar’s solo project, Studies from a Quiet Harvest, is supported by the Discover 09 grant by the Prameya Art Foundation and the India Art Fair. His work combining film, photo performance and installation brings together long-term research conducted in the Ranholla fields of Delhi, where migrants from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand work on small farms of fast-growing crops on lease. He not only studies the capitalist bataiya sharecropping system in which a large part of the produce goes to the land owners without any say of the actual tillers of the soil, but also the impact of the sewage and toxicities from the adjoining Najafgarh drain on the soil and the health of these farmers.

Anushka Rajendran, who has curated this project, feels the 25-year-old artist’s work stood out for its approach. “Data-based research comes together with material and artistic formulations to create an understanding of a complex situation. What stayed with us was the way Sidhant was able to situate the migrant crisis as inextricable from developmental and ecological concerns,” she elaborates. “We tend to think of these issues separately. He has also focused on cultural erasures that come with migration in his photo performances.”

Sidhant hails from a farmer’s family, and he shifted to Delhi from Siwan, Bihar for better opportunity and education. He turned to masks and performances to talk about a violated landscape after seeing bhaona performed in Majuli, Assam. For his first-ever photo performance, he donned the garb of a cactus to signify the thorns of capitalism moulding the unfair bataiya system. Sidhant’s latest work, a performance-based film, Given them a piece of bread and circus and they never revolt, takes these ideas forward.

At the outdoor section of the India Art Fair, an installation, Breathing Space, featuring three large sculptures made from brass and collected concrete debris comes into view. These three structures, looming large at a height of 10 feet, represent Mexican Poppy, Chinese Mullein and Smooth Sowthistle, plants usually dismissed as weeds but which play a vital role in maintaining urban biodiversity. 32-year-old artist Deepak Kumar grew up around nature in Bihar. “No matter how small your house was, you would always find space at the back to grow vegetables,” he says. Though art wasn’t a big part of daily life, Kumar gravitated towards drawing and sculpting at an early age. Between Diwali and Chhat Puja, when the villages would turn into living canvases, he would create kinetic sculptures from soil and cow dung.

When he shifted to Delhi for higher education in 2010, the chaotic urban nature of the city hit him. He was drawn to weeds, which were ignored by the residents—much like the migrants. “No one talks about the impact that loss of weeds has on the urban ecology. They are an important source of pollination,” says Kumar, who started documenting these plants, 2017 onwards when he moved to Kaladham studio in Greater Noida. He began to read books on the etymology and ways to preserve them. Since then, he has articulated this research in different materials, ranging from recycled wood to bronze and brass. “I chose the latter for a reason. When archaeologists dig up an ancient site, metal artefacts emerge. Jo aaj hai, woh aane wale time mein ‘tha’ ho jaayega. These plants will go extinct and become a relic of the past. Brass seems like an apt medium for that,” he adds.

Materiality plays a critical role in each of these artists’ works—the found objects, industrial materials and soil are redolent with material memory. This is evident in Birender Yadav’s work, whose family migrated from Balia in Uttar Pradesh to Jharkhand where his father worked as an ironsmith. When he shifted back to UP to study visual arts at the Banaras Hindu University, Yadav realised that he inhabited some sort of an “in-between world”, a grey area of sorts, where he never really belonged either to UP or to Jharkhand. While pursuing his master’s degree in 2014-15, he met brick workers in Mirzapur, who were migrants from Jharkhand, and they bonded over shared struggles of identity. Some of them worked in hot kilns to take out bricks. The heat washed away their thumbprints. “But they needed to add that same print to paper to get their salary. At that time, the process of Aadhar card enrolment was going on. They were not able to enrol for the Unique Identification Number as they didn’t have a fixed address or markers of identity—later, of course, other biometric checks were introduced. In my project, Erased Faces, I took their thumbprints to create an artistic documentation of their identities,” he says.

Yadav, in his work, also alludes to the boundaries between art and artisan created by pedagogy. He grew up watching his father create tools in mines. But Yadav could fully appreciate his skill only when he came home for a holiday from college. “My father and ironsmiths like him have so much knowledge, refined over generations. But there is no value attached to it. We don’t even call them artisans. I understood their skill once I started working with clay and bricks, and understood the kind of mastery the brick workers had over the medium,” he adds.

Poetic protest is how I would like to define Kulpreet Singh’s work. The issues he touches upon—ranging from farmer’s rights, misconceptions around stubble burning—could have been addressed with a more violent and vehement vocabulary. Instead, he chooses a route of quiet lyricism. In his ongoing video performance and painting series Indelible Black Marks, on view at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Singh works with ash from burnt stubble fields and soil, which gets embedded in the canvases once they are dragged across the charred fields. The two materials become both symbols of regeneration and destruction at the same time. Similarly, he works with nails, which represent both violence and repair. “Poetry is so powerful. Verses from the past are still so relevant. In my work too, I want to approach important issues through a poetic approach,” he says.

Singh turned to art to articulate his ideas on agriculture in 2018 after a workshop on organic farming. He started researching the impact of the Green Revolution, use of pesticides, fair pricing, climate change, groundwater depletion, and farmer’s rights. Soon, performance, video and painting melded fluidly into one another in his conceptual works, and his practice became extremely process-driven. In one of the works, he has written the word ‘farmer’ in 25 languages. In the Extinction Archive, he has sandwiched stubble ash in between rice paper and then dipped it in pesticide. “The process of farming echoes in the way I approach my paintings. The paper is like a field, which needs to be prepared. Like seeds, I scatter and sow drawings on this paper—a dot here, a mark there. I don’t know what the final result will look like. Does a farmer know what the quality of yield will be like? The same is the case with my work. Kaam karne ka reason pata hai, but result kya hoga nahi pata,” he says.

Art and culture too are taking note of this layered process in Singh’s work. This year, he has been chosen as the Future Awardee from India at the Asia Society India Centre’s Asia Arts Game Changer Awards. “Grounded in Punjab’s agrarian landscape, his work approaches farming not as backdrop but as archive—where fields, ash and soil bear the traces of protest, precarity and agrarian crisis,” elaborates Inakshi Sobti, CEO, Asia Society India Centre. “Moving between performance, film and process-based painting, Singh combines deep local knowledge with experimental form, creating a practice that is at once rooted and forward-looking. It is this rare balance that makes his work one to watch closely.”