‘Art is a mirror of nature’ is one of the oldest philosophies. Aristotle proposed this, which has never actually been contested. Humans cannot be separated from nature. Religion says that people come from soil and become part of it. Leave religion, but it has some point. Nature remains the main theme and source of inspiration for art, despite the numerous issues humans face. Long ago, romanticism bid adieu, yet we are still romantic. Still, we go to the beach for the sunset and to the mountain for sunrise. Each of us can respond to the question, “What is nature?” by saying that it is us. If we deprive ourselves of nature, what will remain? Is nature returning to exact retribution on us because we have cut it off from ourselves?
‘He grew like an oak tree,’ writes Gustave Flaubert. That’s right, we grow like oak trees and weaken like banana trunks. Even now, nature continues to serve as a metaphor for depicting humans and marking their inner states. We know, frame by frame, how movies use nature to reflect human conditions.
That nature—that habitat including us—is now in a state of decay. The seeds of destruction we planted are now bearing fruit. These fruits, whose taste we can hardly recognise, show the harshness of our survival, leading us to nightmares. It’s evident, painfully clear, and reflecting everywhere. The question of how quickly survival is possible arises everywhere. And this question comes up in art as well. Questions that arise in human natural environments are the same questions that arise in art.
Artistic activities that coexist with the environment and don’t impose on it are themselves part of modernity. It is possible to interpret the creations of artists such as Andy Goldsworthy as lyrical endeavours carried out in the natural world. The artwork incorporates materials gathered from the natural world, such as stones, wood fragments softened by the river’s flow, flowers, or leaves. Both “nature” and art supplies are created from an area and its natural objects. Nature-inspired art was created to fit into the natural world, much as humans do. These works were created in nature, which served as both a studio and a gallery.
Art, Nature and Reflections
When we move from the word ‘nature’ to the phenomenon of ‘climate change,’ things are completely chaotic. The current situation is extreme heat and heavy rainfall. The usual drizzle and December chill have been replaced by cloudbursts and floods worldwide. When things can change in such a way that floods can happen anytime, like a Wipro techie in Bangalore joking on a troll, ‘Just knowing IT isn’t enough; you should also know swimming to be able to live and work in the city.’ The question of how art reflects this era is crucial. Creations about the changes caused by climate change in human society are a key contemporary theme in world art. Most artworks approach the effects of climate change from multiple angles. Even in some of the last biennale’s highlighted works, climate change was clearly a topic.
In the era of climate change, art discusses a wide range of topics. It was not even such a hot topic ten years ago. These days, it covers topics such as land loss due to climate change. People living in forests and along the coast are among the first to be affected by climate change. Droughts and floods first affect the planet’s vulnerable regions at its edges. The majority of its misery is felt by the locals. The fisherman groups in Odisha and Chellanam (Kerala), the farmers in Assam, and the forest dwellers in Bangladesh are the most remarkable people on the periphery of the planet (which I am mentioning here). The first victims of this shift are those who are similar to them. Contemporary art delves deeply into the aspects of climate change. The art of climate change highlights its consequences on humanity rather than how it has changed the planet. Installation capabilities are used by numerous artists and art collectives to address this topic.
Paribartana Mohanty, an artist from Odisha and New Delhi, depicts the destiny of a fishing community in Podampet, Odisha, in her piece “A Fate’s Brief Memoir.” This research demonstrates how a community in an Indian coastal region is continually affected by climate change. Images and videos are used to showcase and communicate the concept. Communities impacted by climate change are represented by the Nolias. As they struggle to exist on the periphery of our own times, many such communities go unrecognised. Amid other distractions, we are most likely to miss them. The project “Climate Change” illustrates these margins by showing a community enduring hardship. This is expertly done by Paribartana Mohanty.
The Noliyas community has been forced to leave their homes due to continuous cyclones, moving to temporary shelters and even to other states in search of work. Their trip serves as a reminder of how delicate the Earth’s boundaries are. The Earth’s boundaries are already being touched and shaken by climate change. Cities are attacked in waves by cloud bursts. It sounds like a scene from a Hollywood film when they discuss flooding caused by an hour of rain. The goal of this effort is to monitor and trace the Nolias community, which has been displaced repeatedly and gone missing. What message does this community—which has evolved into a community of climate migrants—offer to humanity? It is that our comfortable lives are being threatened by climate change. Based on the traces left by the Nolias community, the study is progressing.
For this marginalised fishing community, which belongs to a scheduled caste, the idea of having their own home has always been a lowly, temporary concept, forced to keep wandering. Right now, their existence is transient. From moving from disaster zones to relief centres, and then to temporary shelters, their situation keeps changing. The stress of losing a place wears a person down completely. The instability of life scatters them to many places. Constant journeys back and forth leave them unprotected and sorrowful. Paribartana has managed to turn this story of disaster into a powerful visual documentation by closely depicting scenes from before and after the disaster. By using lenticular printing possibilities as well, the artist has been able to deeply mark the people who vanish from one area. By giving a symbol of invisibility to those who disappear, he has given the art project immense visibility.
The work ‘Khaal Gaon‘ by Anga Art Collective, an artist group founded in 2012 and primarily based in Assam, visualises the problems faced by farmers along the Brahmaputra River. The Brahmaputra, which dries up in certain seasons, has wiped out many villages. The exhibition at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art showcases Anga Art Collective’s efforts to trace the stories and creations of those vanished villages, reflecting their current state. This exhibition brings to life the stories, folktales, flavours, music, chores, myths, children’s tales, and even folk songs of those unseen villages. It follows the narrative style of folk stories, portraying a world where everything comes together in the village.
It feels like the village is alive when you go through this creation. There’s music and dance in it. There are children and elders. They have their own songs and stories. Evening times are filled with harvesting and sowing. With fish, dried chillies, seeds, and baskets all together, ‘Khal Gavon’ brings an entire village together. In the exhibition made of bamboo, with bamboo seats, toys, cages, and seeds, Khal Gavon unfolds like a folk tale.
Anga Art Collective is a group of artists that generally involves artists from the northeastern states within their experimental, research, and conceptual processes. Anga Art Collective is on a journey searching for lost villages and their cultures. As part of these ongoing reflections, the exhibition at the Kiran Nadar Museum was included. This is a re-presentation of a work that was previously shown in an exhibition in Dhaka. The ups and downs of a river’s water determine and sometimes erase the lives by its banks. The river passes so close that it brushes against them. Their lives flow so intimately with the river. At times, the metaphor of boats floating on the river also fits their lives.
Every year, so many villages are submerged by the Brahmaputra. The farmers in Assam have started seeing the villages that get dunked each year as offerings to the goddess. It’s not about lamenting; they are about constructing another village. That is how villagers reflected on the flood. Flood is energising them with a new mission in life. This piece of art also requires the viewer’s active participation. With rolling carts, picture books that can be opened and viewed, and sprouting shoots, Khall Gaavon turns into a lively village scene. The sprout is the soul of this art. The sprout transforms into the village’s soul, becoming a habitat in motion. The exhibition’s impact is the realisation that lost villages are like a song that can be sung through the sprout.
This project was built on sprouting. The arrangement of the art piece is completed as the audience interacts with it. Just by shifting a layer of sprouts, you can see the hidden seeds or dried fish within it. To fully grasp this village narrative, one must also consider what is hidden from view. Village life begins at every corner, and with every turn, the village reveals its beauty. The shape of the fish, nurtured on sprouted paddy, is made tangible through video depiction, giving an experiential feel of this project. Quai Gavon makes us realise how much village life is shaped by the love humans have for fish and paddy. The fertility of the village will be in the plot of dried chillies hidden among the sprouts. This creation represents not only the problems of the farmers in Assam but also their culture and way of life. Their life is like a fable, where someone lost in the forest returns as a fish in the Brahmaputra. When the flow finds new paths, what they have built up disappears just as quickly.
This project shows how art (including poetry, literature, and music) can act like a mirror reflecting nature and, through that, time. When it reflects back to each person, it’s nature that sees itself. Spending time with this installation makes you realise the deep understanding that humans are, in essence, part of nature. The awareness that every space also belongs to the viewer is what turns art into a creation of vision. There will be moments when the artist becomes just another viewer. Artworks have the capacity to grow and expand beyond even the artist. Artists are not just born with creativity; they also fade away. Only the art remains. It is in that art that the contemporary global reality of climate change becomes the subject. The social mission of creations that last forever is being realised through the ongoing research of the Ung Art Collective.
The title of the work itself is formed from linguistic and cultural layers, combining the Assamese words ‘Khaal,’ meaning lowland, and ‘Gaon,’ meaning village. This art can be seen as the construction of a new visual language, drawing on the possibilities of the installation medium. The waterways of the Brahmaputra are changing, filled with experiences that resonate with human consciousness. The work reflects not just the villages being displaced, but also the depth of realisation in many ways. Animated folktales, imagined stories turned into video documentaries, childhood memories rolled into moving images, dried chillies hiding flavours – in this way, the work transforms and expands through many forms.
Art becomes like a mirror open to nature, maybe because human life is, too. No one can move forward without opening up to nature. Sometimes, art is just the medium that marks our progress and our look back. In that sense, the Ang Art Collective, by telling the stories of villages in Assam, is highlighting the phenomenon of climate change humanity is experiencing in strong language.
Joydep Roaja, an artist from the Chittagong hill ranges in Bangladesh, creates art that indirectly addresses climate change. His work centres on the memory of the lost streams that disappeared when wealthy planters cleared the hills to start plantations. The streams were once the main source of drinking water for Roaja’s village tucked in the hills, but now they only flow during the rainy season. The lack of drinking water has started to affect the villages at the foot of the Chittagong hills. Climate change is a result of human alterations to nature, and later it comes back to humans through their art. The stones we knew long ago are coming back to find us. It’s sure to be head-crushing!
A part of Roja’s exhibition is a visual narrative of the army’s cruelty, which was a constant presence in the Chittagong hills. The army’s memories have been turned into childhood toys. But it is in the second part that the hills and the lost water flow come in. The artist started this project from a performance he began with his daughter in 2009. Roja presents the subject in both collage form, combining photos and drawings, and in other ways. The simple language makes Roja’s creation accessible. Development always becomes a problem. If it is something that destroys the water sources in the hills, how can development be understood as development? Not just humans and art, development shouldn’t also be a mirror opened up to nature, right? Roja’s work raises many such questions in a very simple way. Keeping Roja’s creations in mind, human life is seen as a way of living together with trees and humans.
Isn’t it true that not only humans and art, but development should also act like a mirror open to nature? Roj’s creations raise many such questions in a very simple way. Considering Roj’s works, we can say he is an artist who understands human life as a way of living where humans and trees coexist.
Four artworks from four regions that can be said to echo the phenomenon of climate change; similar in some ways yet different in their narratives. Each artist looks at climate change from different angles. The medium is chosen according to the subject they present. It’s not in the methodology of the Nolyas class formed on Lenticule prints by Paribartan Mohan, but the Anga Art Collective presents their subject. So, the mediums and presentation styles vary, apparently. But the theme is the same: climate change. Nolias is not the only reason for society’s migration. In Roger’s case, human intervention is the main cause, but the lack of drinking water sources is a natural issue. There were recent reports of things ripening under temperatures of forty degrees in Bangladesh. Some of the climate changes are man-made. Efforts to understand and convey that through art are also quite active.
Krispin Joseph PX, a poet and journalist, completed an MFA in art history and visual studies at the University of Hyderabad and an MA in sociology and cultural anthropology from the Central European University, Vienna.
