The Living Earth | Sept Oct 2026 | Iram modern

The Living Earth: Modernism, Craft and Ecological Knowledge in India. The Living Earth proposes that ecological thought in India is not a new import into art, but an older and continuing inheritance embedded in craft, ritual, folk knowledge, agrarian life, material practices, and modernist pedagogy. The exhibition places Indian modern masters in dialogue with living traditions and contemporary artists to show how land, water, animals, seasons, labour, devotion, waste, and memory have shaped artistic thinking.

Rather than treating folk, tribal, or devotional arts as decorative sources, the exhibition positions them as knowledge systems that offer urgent ways of rethinking sustainability today. At a time when climate change is increasingly addressed through data, disaster, and policy, The Living Earth turns to art as a field of ecological memory. The exhibition asks: what forms of environmental knowledge already exist within India’s artistic, craft, ritual, and community traditions? How have modern and contemporary artists drawn from these traditions not as nostalgia, but as living methods of thinking with land, water, labour, animals, seasons, and materials? Conceived for Ahmedabad Cultural Week, the exhibition responds to the urgent climate conditions of the present: rising heat, disrupted monsoons, air pollution, extractive urbanisation, vanishing biodiversity, and the precarity of agrarian life. Yet it resists the format of a didactic climate-change exhibition. Instead, it proposes that Indian art history already contains ecological ways of seeing. The exhibition follows a lineage from Santiniketan and Baroda to Gujarat’s living traditions and contemporary practices, bringing together modern masters, folk and ritual objects, and artists working with waste, handmade material, ecological anxiety, and community knowledge. At the heart of the exhibition is a refusal of the binary between “modern” and “traditional.”

K.G.Subramanyan’s practice and pedagogy opened Indian modernism to craft, mural, toy, terracotta, textile, myth, and popular image-making. His thinking at Baroda helped shape an art education that was not confined to the white cube, but engaged with making as a broader cultural practice. Haku Shah extended this commitment into deep engagement with rural, folk, tribal, and Gandhian worlds ,  treating craft and community traditions as repositories of philosophy rather than ethnographic residue. Jyoti Bhatt’s photographs and documentation of village, folk, and traditional art forms, especially in Gujarat, become crucial records of living environments, wallpaintings, rituals, bodies, tools, and everyday surfaces.  Amit Ambalal, based in Ahmedabad, offers a bridge to Nathdwara and Pichhwai traditions; his interest in the Nathdwara school and his own painting practice allow devotional image-worlds to enter the exhibition not as heritage, but as ecological theatre. The living traditions in the exhibition are not supporting material; they are conceptual anchors. Pichhwai and Nathdwara painting bring forward a sacred ecology of seasons, cows, lotus ponds, Govardhan, monsoon, food offerings, and cyclical time. Government craft documentation describes Pichhwai paintings as devotional backdrops for Shrinathji, made by Nathdwara painting communities and narrating Krishna’s divine episodes. Mata-ni-Pachedi, associated with the Vaghari/Devipujak communities of Gujarat, creates portable shrines through cloth, goddess imagery, and natural dye traditions; accounts of the practice also place its makers historically along the Sabarmati’s edges.

These traditions hold ecological knowledge through ritual use, material discipline, seasonal consciousness, and collective memory. The contemporary artists extend these concerns into the present. Naina Dalal, though better positioned as a senior Baroda artist rather than an emerging one, brings printmaking, the body, interiority, and human vulnerability into the ecological frame; her training at MSU Baroda under figures including N.S. Bendre and K.G. Subramanyan makes her a meaningful bridge within the Baroda lineage. The Living Earth therefore imagines ecology not only as environment, but as relationship:between maker and material, body and land, deity and season, community and ritual, object and use. It argues that sustainability cannot be reduced to the management of resources; it must also involve forms of attention, reverence, repair, and interdependence. By bringing modern masters, contemporary artists, and living traditions into a shared curatorial space, the exhibition offers an Indian art-historical response to the climate crisis; one rooted not in spectacle, but in the intelligence of making, remembering, and living with the earth.

- Satyajit Dave
May 2026, Mumbai