Lounge
Artists take the farmlands into the gallery
Summary
A new generation of artists is countering exploitative models of agriculture and creating works of art that embody care for the land and justice for farmers
In 1930, Nandalal Bose painted a mural of Rabindranath Tagore driving an ox and plough amidst a group of performers. Titled Halakarshana, it was created in Surul, a few kilometres from Santiniketan, at an experimental rural project called Sriniketan where Tagore brought together art and agriculture. It is nearly a century since Bose made the mural, and agrarian-themed art has finally come full circle in India.
From being done on modernist walls, it has moved back to the very fields it addresses, and is cultivated by artists from historically disenfranchised communities. This turn, perhaps, has to do with the current sociopolitical environment where scenes of farmers taking to the streets in protest have become part of the mainstream, and farmers’ issues are visible to a wider public.
Since independence, agriculture has been the site of ecological and economic crisis, first due to its industrialisation by the Green Revolution and more recently, as the protests reveal, due to policies that benefit corporations at the expense of farmers.
Hailing from farming backgrounds, with varying levels of land and caste privilege, a new generation of Indian artists is countering exploitative models of agriculture through works that embody care and justice for farmlands. They work according to ideas of time connected to the tempo of fieldwork, acknowledge interspecies and non-human connections in acts of farming and preserve local knowledge and memories, whether through figuration on pulp drawn from the crops grown on the farm or abstraction of the field’s landscape.
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Some of them are associated with the platform, AgriForum, initiated in 2020 by the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) to reflect on agrarian creativities and criticalities. The AgriForum reading group led to a show called Turning: On Field and Work, curated by FICA director Vidya Sivadas at the Serendipity Arts Festival 2023. It featured prominent artistic voices engaged with agrarian issues.
Annalisa Mansukhani, programmes manager at FICA says, “It’s a moment where the sociopolitical or the cultural is registering very differently. And while it is a crisis, it’s interesting to see how people are also finding roots to address it."
BACK TO THE ROOTS
How might we trace these roots in terms of art history? As revealed by Bose’s mural, Santiniketan’s artists have long been inspired by landscapes and the communities connected to them. But going beyond the representational paradigm seems to have happened only now. Similar to artist-run farms that seeded agricultural art movements worldwide, in India farm-based art initiatives like the Gram Art Project and Anga Art Collective flourished in the early 2010s. Many contemporary artists, working with agriculture today developed their practice through community-driven and socially engaged projects. “A generation of artists in the 1990s started looking into the ‘collective idea’. That was an important moment. Initiatives started coming up wherein artists were taking up a certain responsibility of bringing people together. I think those traits give confidence to a newer generation," says Sanchayan Ghosh, associate professor with the department of painting at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan.
Ghosh has worked with subaltern landscapes for 20 years. In the past decade, he has observed theoretical shifts that have bolstered contemporary practices in this field, particularly in the context of gender and indigenous voices. “Ecofeminist methodologies have become a tool to engage with what land produces or how it embodies certain notions of identity… Ownership that is inherent in the land as a lived experience. There is an emergence of the indigenous and anthropocene (discourse) and concerns about global warming," he elaborates.
Within this broader engagement with ecology lies the subset of trained fine artists responding to agriculture. Ghosh feels that specific concerns are being explored now. “What are the memories that you carry as a body or as a culture and how does it get reflected in your practice? Especially with the emergence of Dalit politics and aesthetics, there is now this huge difference in approach between the urban-trained students and students coming from very small villages and rural contexts."
Lounge looks at four significant practices that are rooted in the soil.
REPRESENTING THE LANDSCAPE
Gyanwant Yadav, who lives between Pratapgarh in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, makes abstract mixed media works and installations. These feature paddy, dust, soil, caste-marked farming tools and handmade natural paper. While doing his master’s in fine arts in Delhi, Yadav started contemplating ways of bringing agriculture and scenes from home into his work. “I began paying closer attention to the ground reality. Take, for instance, the effect of synthetic fertilisers on the texture of the land in the context of my field. I brought this into my artistic practice, both structurally and materially," says Yadav, 32.
The form of the field delineated through bold lines made its way into their work. The approach to landscape was non-representational, and more symbolic. In 2024, Yadav’s project, A Tale of Seven Villages, showed at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art’s exhibition The Elemental You, featuring a collaborative performance with a Birha singer, Keshav Devi, who responded to Yadav’s engagement with the villagers’ lived ecology. He cedes, “Landscape bahot bada daayra hai, us mein main dhoondh raha hoon (Landscape is a vast ambit in which I am searching)."
CREATIVE INTERPRETATIONS
Originally from Tripura and living in Delhi, Gopa Roy, 34, produces paper from organic fibre, pulp and bark to engage with the material’s gnarled texture to express her homeland’s landscapes. In representative series like My Native Land (2021), she paints watercolour scenes from her village on to amorphous pieces of bagasse pulp. Initially, it was the high cost of conventional art supplies that made Roy turn to readily available material such as the colourful Tripura soil for pigments, and natural pulp (bamboo, banana and the quick-boiling rice straw) as a surface. She ultimately found creative reasons to stick with these mediums.
“I started experimenting with pulp and began landscaping (the paper), finally rejecting canvas because I wasn’t comfortable with it. With pulp, I felt that I could play with it and mould it as I wanted," she says.
An affinity towards agricultural themes was always part of Roy’s consciousness: “I grew up seeing agricultural practices in my village as that is the main source of livelihood for people in Tripura. On my bus ride to college, I would observe women working in the Durgabari tea garden." For a site-specific land artwork in her village, SECURE (UN)SECURE (2021), she planted paddy and placed white rubber scrap amidst the growth, an ensemble arranged in the shape of Tripura’s map. “Tripura’s landscape is transforming from paddy fields to rubber plantations through encroachment. In this work, I tried to address that."
MULTIDISCIPLINARY PRACTICE
Dharmendra Prasad, a member of Assam-based Anga Art Collective, uses hay, crop residue, bamboo and jute to create works across a range of formats—painting, photography, sculpture, installation, performance, video and pedagogy.
His Residuality, an iteration of which showed at the 2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, comprised crop residue installations, straw sculptures, mud paintings and video projection. In 2024, he was part of the Anga Art Collective project, Granary, which took inspiration from bamboo watchtowers in villages meant for observing elephant movements and built a multifaceted repository for indigenous knowledge and praxis.
Describing his practice as “agrarian place-making", Prasad says, “I am interested in thinking and making from the perspective of life…I come from a certain time and space and occupational practice, so I have to see the textures and intensities and urgencies of that background." Uncomfortable with descriptions of his work that foreground agricultural materials at the cost of his philosophical engagement with land as a mode of being, he explains, “The medium of my practice is time and toil."
ACTION-BASED ART
Time is also the catalyst for Punjab-based Kulpreet Singh’s artistry, manifested through paintings that result from performances either by the artist himself or involving other participants, prints and film incorporating agricultural matters. “A medium has its own possibilities as farming does. Mere kaam ko time lagta hai (My work takes time). It is process-based, a reaction to an action, and I cannot presume the result. If I sow a seed, I can’t know with certainty what the resulting flavour of the fruit will be," he explains.
Performance is an integral part of his ongoing series, Indelible Marks. Singh, 39, noticed that the residue from a stubble fire in a field resembled char-tipped pens. “I thought the story of the Green Revolution should be written with this. The way I ran with the canvas through the residue…" These works were part of Indelible Marks II, Singh’s landmark 2024 show at Mumbai’s Mirchandani + Steinreucke gallery, comprising film, print and paintings made of stubble-ash and ash from the stoves that warmed the 2020-21 farmers’ protests.
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CURATORIAL FRAMEWORKS
Practices of this kind can engender new curatorial formats outside the white cube and museum space. The fact that Umesh S., who works in Varanasi and his ancestral village of Kurmurhi in Bihar, is the artist-in-residence at the forthcoming India Art Fair, indicates a certain recognition of agricultural art in the mainstream. He engages with the disappearance of seeds and erosion of agrarian traditions.
Perhaps showcases of agricultural art need to go beyond conventional exhibition spaces. For a lot of art programmers, the role of a listener becomes important. “Even if there is a curatorial framework, it comes from the conversations we have, taking from the vocabulary and sharing that happens within the group," says Mansukhani.
Ghosh feels the curatorial challenge lies in whether we can avoid romanticising the engagement with the land and reducing it to consumable representations. It also lies in the way contemporary art institutions function in terms of timelines and operational structures. As Prasad points out, “art institutions practice industrial time" making it impossible to accommodate the rhythms of the field and its radical potential. For agricultural art practices to flourish, different curatorial and theoretical frameworks must be cultivated as well, which don’t just fit agricultural practices into existing formats but create new ones in response.
Kamayani Sharma is an independent writer and podcaster.
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