AgriForum
Acts of Re/Collection

With contributions by Anga Art Collective, Malavika Bhatia, Ankan Dutta, Sanchayan Ghosh, Gram Art Project, Blaise Joseph, Rashmi Kaleka, Shubham Kumar, Maksud Ali Mondal, Ashis Palei, Bhikari Pradhan, Gopa Roy, Sheshadev Sagria, Niroj Satpathy, Umesh S, and Gyanwant Yadav. 
Facilitated by FICA (Vidya Shivadas, Annalisa Mansukhani and Stuti Bhavsar) 

AgriForum was founded in 2021 in response to the need for a space to support artistic engagements with the agrarian. Initially, it was an online reading group for artists and collectives across India whose work is locally rooted in landscape, ecology, and community. Since then, it has evolved into a growing network focused on the agrarian as site and concept, with a shared enquiry into its many material expressions. For across, with, nearby, AgriForum returns to its central question: how do we read the field across forms, methods, and modalities? The project takes shape as a library, offering spaces for reading, gathering, and learning with different artistic and agrarian practices. Here, artist books, workbooks, stories, and speculative propositions gather as a dispersed commons for collaborative encounters. 
Under a newly commissioned shamiana (a tent or canopy used as a sheltered space for gatherings) by artist Sanchayan Ghosh, diverse practices convene through embodied ways of listening. This iteration of the AgriForum library extends its ongoing practice of hosting exhibitions, learning modules, and site-specific explorations that examine histories and urgencies of the agrarian and its connections to artistic practice. Inviting these interdisciplinary methods and material forms into new conversations and constellations, this latest gathering becomes a meeting point — fertile scaffolding for new participatory structures, pedagogic experiments, and emergent solidarities. 

AgriForum is a platform hosted by the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), which brings together artists and collectives from across India whose practices respond to their immediate geographies. The platform supports a multiplicity of approaches, fostering critical dialogue and collaboration around the sociopolitical and ecological dimensions of the agrarian. Building connections across practices and disciplines, AgriForum’s activities centre on issues including food sovereignty, multispecies relationalities, regenerative possibilities, tools and toolsets, the role of Indigenous knowledge systems, acts of resistance, and extractive apparatuses. Fostering ecologies of care, AgriForum continues to gather with voices and alliances working to reconfigure our shared understandings of land, soil, seed, root, and spirit.
AgriForum is supported by the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation and the Shared Ecologies Program, Shyama Foundation. 

Ankan Dutta
Uruli 

A set of deconstructed books by Ankan Dutta, Uruli traces the story of a rice mill in Assam through a non-linear narrative. Made from jute sacks used to transport goods and grains, the material becomes the primary carrier for examining histories of rice production in the Brahmaputra Valley in Assam, Northeast India. Rice cultivation has shaped many sociocultural norms in the region, and Dutta bears witness to how an earlier reliance on dhekis (traditional rice mills) has shifted due to industrialisation, causing a drastic relocation of labour and livelihoods. With recourse to his father’s experience of working at a mill, Dutta weaves a narrative of the stories and experiences of those whose lives were affected by its closure. Through drawing, stitching, and screen printing, he marks the stubborn surface of jute in response to its threadbare character — frayed and torn in parts, stamped and branded with labels in others. Uruli is an Assamese word that refers to the sound made by women at auspicious occasions such as marriages and festivals. This sound, an echo of survival and subsistence, reverberates across these pages as a reminder of the generational and sustainable rhythms of livelihood that now stand overshadowed by rituals of industrial development. 

Ankan Dutta (b. 1987, Sivasagar, Assam) works mostly site-specifically, exploring sculptural forms, materials, and motifs stemming from the agrarian landscapes of his immediate environment. Pursuing questions of industrialisation and labour, Dutta keenly observes how socio-economic dependencies, agro-ecological interrelationships, and cultural rituals have unravelled over time. Dutta holds a BFA in sculpture from the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Guwahati, Assam, and is a recipient of the Emerging Artist Award given by the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art (2022). His works have been shown at several exhibitions, including however the image enters its force remains, at Vadehra Art Gallery (2024); Call to Disorder: Experiments in Practice and Research and Turning: On Field and Work at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2019 and 2023, respectively); Blurred Perimeter at Dwijing Festival, Assam (2018); and the Kochi-Muziris Students’ Biennale (2016–2017). He lives and works in Sibsagar, Assam. 

Anga Art Collective
kNOw School Exercises 

Proposing a pedagogical reimagination of the book form, and a counterpoint to extractive modes of knowledge production, Assam-based Anga Art Collective presents two interrelated exercises, asking: ‘what is reading?’, ‘who creates knowledge, and who has access to knowledge?’, and ‘how can the urgencies of local ecologies be a central force in rethinking the notion of book-making?’ The exercises draw from a workshop at Vidya: The Living School in Subahi, Assam, which formed part of the Collective’s ongoing initiative ‘kNOw School’. Developed to help expand the school’s pedagogical boundaries and library infrastructure, kNOw School here sought to harness playfulness in children’s observations and visualisations of their immediate landscapes. The exercises involved mapping, working with found and natural materials, and understanding local narrative forms and material processes. Developing a vocabulary for the landscape, discussions with the children traced ecological narratives found in mainstream curricula, and addressed the gaps therein. Looking beyond traditional and elitist book formats that codify knowledge, Anga Art Collective encouraged participants to reconfigure and reflect on the narratives they wished to tell, thinking through community structure and marginalisation, and the significance of local motifs and craft traditions. 

Anga Art Collective (founded 2010, Assam) began with the aim to engage critically — visually and materially — with the geographical and social landscape of Assam, through curation, exhibitions, and community art engagement. The group explores the idea of the collective as an expanding process rather than a closed ensemble, sharing knowledge across disciplines and collaborating with village communities, academics, and activists at various events and in diverse situations. The collective founded a public outreach and pedagogical project called ‘kNOw School’ in 2020, and established an Indigenous library project and community space named ‘Granary’ in Bhalla Village, Assam, in 2022. Recipients of the Art Space Grant by Afield/Kadist (2024) and Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation’s Installation Art Grant (2022), among other awards, the collective has exhibited widely, including at Sharjah Biennial 16 (2025), the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennale (2023), and in the exhibition Very Small Feelings at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2023). 

Ashis Palei
Matti Khiaa (Soil Eaters), 2025 

In Ashis Palei’s practice, soil as a processual and elemental material is imbued with political history, appearing as layered, foundational space, and gathering Indigenous experiences, notions of community, and indelible traces of socio-economic discrimination. Extending these inquiries, Matti Khiaa (Soil Eaters) takes shape as a haptic assemblage of image plates and narratives, presenting a (re)reading of well-known art-historical works and their articulations of marginalised communities. Cast in mud and drawing on motifs often used as caste identifiers, the relief-like plates reference well-known sculptures from India, such as the Triumph of Labour by D. P. Roy Chowdhury and The Santhal Family by Ramkinkar Baij. Palei’s interventions invite viewers to think of the embodied tendencies and languages of mainstream art-historical representation. Annotated with poems and stories, the reliefs form an urgent, reflexive counter-archive of sorts, built almost palimpsest-like with vocabularies of labour, precarity, monumentality, and resistance — a gathering of profound residues that exist in the margins. 

Ashis Palei (b. 1991, Puri, Odisha) explores the intersection of identity, discrimination, and the caste inequalities and hierarchies that are perpetuated as societal rituals. Palei challenges these rituals through the assertion of marginalised figures and motifs, evoked through paintings, site-specific installations, and sculptures made using soil, cow dung, terracotta, paper pulp, watercolour, charcoal, found objects, and waste materials. Palei’s work is anchored by the use of soil as a medium, rooted in the belief that soil is the identity of the marginalised. Palei completed his MFA at the College of Art, University of Delhi. He has exhibited widely and was an artist in residence at Khoj Peers in New Delhi in 2022. Palei is the recipient of several awards, including the Emerging Artist Award given by the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art (2024), and the India Artist Relief Fund facilitated by the Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru, and 1Shanthiroad Studio (2021). He lives and works in Orissa.

Bhikari Pradhan
Millet Muscle: Where Migration Meets the Body, 2025 

Bhikari Pradhan’s practice is informed by stories of home, belonging, and identity, centred on his home state of Odisha. Millet Muscle: Where Migration Meets the Body holds within its delicate pages the ordeals, hopes, strategies of survival, and, above all, the aspirations of migrant workers, women, and children from the region. Pradhan traces the contours of these lives across conversations, workshops, and gatherings, exploring the exigencies underlying their journeys. A constellation of narratives, the stories are painstakingly collected and handwritten by the artist, indexing different cultural forms and Indigenous knowledges rooted in agrarian practices. Moving across cycles of sowing and harvesting, myths and community beliefs, agrarian festivals and theatre performances, Pradhan follows the trajectories of these traditions and gestures, how they continue to be upheld and interpreted, their inevitable evolutions discomfiting yet necessary. Bearing witness to fraying ecological and communal bonds, deepening webs of political subjugation, and the looming spectre of climate change, the stories also illuminate unique bonds of community spirit and togetherness. 

Bhikari Pradhan (b. 1996, Ganjam, Odisha) has an installation-based practice that is deeply rooted in community engagement. Delving into the relations between local architectures, Indigenous cultures, and the artefacts of displaced and domestic workers, he employs discarded materials and ceramics to reflect upon handcrafted construction, ideas of museumisation, and the presentation and interpretation of disappearing culture and heritage. Pradhan studied sculpture at the Government College of Art and Crafts, Khallikote, Orissa, and received his MFA in sculpture from Visva Bharati University, Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, West Bengal. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Emerging Artist Award given by the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art (2024) and the ART ICHOL Sculpture Fellowship (2024–2025). Pradhan has exhibited internationally and has completed residencies at Utsha Foundation for Contemporary Art in Orissa (2025) and Niv Art Centre in New Delhi (2024). He is currently based in Orissa. 

Blaise Joseph
Puzha Ozhukatte (Let the River Flow), 2025 

A chronicle and a testament, Puzha Ozhukatte (Let the River Flow) is an installation by Blaise Joseph, drawing from his long-term research on the Vempuzha River in Kerala, along whose banks he spent his childhood. Composed of a painting, two artist books, interview transcripts, and audio recordings, it charts a circuitous relationship with the river, mapping processes of nurture and neglect. Testimonies present various lives, afterlives, and memories of the river; the site of Vempuzha emerges as a critical node for Joseph’s practice as he maps the community’s demographics, their dependence on its ecologies, as well as their socio-cultural stratifications. Revealing the effects of industrialisation on the surrounding environment, exemplified by the eroding riverbank, Joseph’s installation follows the site’s drastic shifts in cultivation, from multi-crop farms to monoculture plantations, and the unregulated mining of sand banks and soil. In Bergen, the river is conjured through soil samples and earthy pigments, inviting viewers to touch, feel, and to ask questions including, ‘if water is not external to us, where does a river go?’; ‘where do we hold it — in our memories, in our bodies, in our relationships to each other?’; and ‘if a river could remember what we did — what we continue to do — where would we place our thirst, our lives?’ 

Blaise Joseph (b. 1976, Kerala) is an artist and art educator based in Kerala, whose murals and paintings address socio-economic, political, and environmental issues, especially as these connect to rivers in various parts of India and the histories of grassroots movements like Narmada Bachao Andolan and Kandankali Samaram. Joseph has co-created murals in community spaces in cities including Kolkata, Delhi, Bangaluru, and Patna, and he engages extensively in art projects with marginalised communities. 
Joseph holds a BFA in sculpture from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and an MA in philosophy from Loyola College, Madras University, Chennai. Since 2018, he has been the programme manager and curator of the Art Room Project at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. A former resident fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Italy (2024), his work has featured in exhibitions such as Very Small Feelings at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi (2023), Lokame Tharavadu in Kerala (2021), and at the 2023 Dhaka Art Summit. 

Gopa Roy
Tool Workspace, 2025 

For Gopa Roy, paper is a powerful metaphor for land and its residual textures — its remnants and the stories that seed it. A conduit of history, paper — and the forms it takes — produces rich possibilities for exchange and collaboration, forming palimpsestic networks that deeply interest the artist. Circulating handmade paper among the AgriForum participants, Roy invited them to contribute ideas, objects, and perspectives around the tool as a physical and social agent. Gathering these, she crafted a book, foregrounding the tool as a means of living with the land. The central provocation of Roy’s exercise with the ‘toolbook’ was then further extended during her Gästeatelier Krone residency in Switzerland, where she expanded upon the transmissive potential of these acts of papermaking and bookmaking across lingual and cultural diversity. Here, Roy installs a gathering of her material, functional, and narrative explorations as a Tool Workspace — an attempt to bring together new perceptions and understandings of the tool as an ever-evolving, living site at the heart of the agrarian expanse.

Gopa Roy (b. 1990, Tripura) creates installations, sculptures, and drawings examining the relationship between memory, labour, and materiality. She observes the textural manifestations of land at different sites and deploys them in her work to reconsider land as a metaphor. Inspired by the farming culture, local life, and craft traditions of her village in Tripura, Northeast India, Roy’s practice further observes the migrational histories and multicultural identities that span the India-Bangladesh border. Roy pursued her Bachelor of Visual Arts in painting at the Government College of Art and Craft, Agartala, Tripura, and her MFA in painting at Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal. Roy’s solo show Existence opened at Triveni Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2021, and she has participated in group exhibitions including The scars you can’t see at Doare Studio, Tripura (2023), RICE EATERS 101 | N.E. at Emami Art, Kolkata (2021), A-PART: Stories of Lands and Lines at Akar Prakar Contemporary, Delhi (2019), and Lines That Divide, Lands That Remember, at Forum Schlossplatz, Switzerland (2025) 

Gram Art Project
Eaten Cotton (A love story, a cookbook) 

Eaten Cotton (A love story, a cookbook) is a book by Gram Art Project, conceived collectively and with many contributors responsible for its production. Created in Paradsinga in Madhya Pradesh, the work is an experiment in copyleft publishing, inviting readers to use, modify, and distribute its contents freely, much like a seed, on the condition that anything derived from it is bound by the same conditions. Eaten Cotton’s makers include Gram Art Project, Beejpatra, and Cotton Stainers, all in Paradsinga. With text by Mukta Patil, the book is produced with support from New Natures: A Terrible Beauty is Born, a group show organised by the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, and curated by Ravi Agarwal, as well as the Shared Ecologies programme of the Shyama Foundation in Delhi. Graphics and illustrations are contributed by AlagAngle Design Co (ADC) and Vinit Ghate. The book holds within itself the seed of a story, and is, in fact, the story of a seed. It is dedicated to all those who coexist with it, all those beheld by it, and to those who behold it. 

Gram Art Project (founded 2013, Paradsinga, Madhya Pradesh) is a group of artists, farmers, farm labourers, young volunteers, and women — people of diverse identities connected through living and working in and around the village of Paradsinga, in Sausar Tehsil, Chhindwara district, Madhya Pradesh. The group formed in 2013 and farms on 16 acres of land, working towards soil-water conservation and a seed bank, while processing their produce into eco-friendly products and artworks that address conscious consumption. Translating their stories into performances, papers, books, and other interactive artworks, the group works towards a sustainable form of exploitation-free living, valuing collective decision making and barter systems. At Paradsinga, they seek to build a shared consciousness in their daily living that is rooted in sovereignty and a sustained attempt to consciously hold open a space for multiplicities in the intricate and delicate web of life, extending their care-based approach to both human and more-than-human entities. 

Gyanwant Yadav
Tools of Yamuna Landscape: Changing from Green to Barren, 2025 

Through mark-making and cartographic gestures, Gyanwant Yadav traces the shifting textures of farmlands, retracing their socio-cultural and ecological undercurrents across his engagement with the Gangetic plain of Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. His performance Tools of Yamuna Landscape: Changing from Green to Barren reflects on the predicaments of migrant farmers along Delhi’s Yamuna River, where fertile pastures are being gradually overtaken by factories, and are increasingly marked by barren, wrinkled land. Here, haptic and painful acts of tending the land — inscribing the body with soil, tangled in crop residues, weighted by stony clay — become gestures of mourning, of holding on to the dry earth’s fading hope. Yadav’s search for a lost ecology continues at a nearby brick kiln, atop a six-foot mound of soil, a primeval memorial to the land’s original height, now dug out, eroded, and consumed by kilns and commercial agrarian economies. In the performance, as memories of the site are excavated and the mound is marked, unmarked, and marked again, Yadav’s poetic, embodied grappling reflects on the entanglement of land as body, and body as tool. 

Gyanwant Yadav (b. 1992, Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh) works across painting, performance, video, and installation, examining the transformation of rural landscapes and practices. Drawing on his agrarian roots and village life in Uttar Pradesh, he attends to the changing textures of the agricultural field — its environments and ecologies — and the effects of urbanism on village life. Inspired by the textural surfaces of village walls, he explores elements of the agrarian landscape, its inhabitants, and the residues they leave behind. Yadav studied at Delhi College of Art and is a recipient of several awards and residencies, including the Inlaks Fine Art Award (2023), Arthshila X Khoj Artists Residency (2022), and Khoj Peers (2022). He has exhibited widely, and in group shows including IMAGINARIUM 2.0 at Emami Art, Kolkata (2025); Seven Villages: A Tale Untold at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2024); and Call to Disorder: Experiments in Practice and Research and Turning: On Field and Work at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2019 and 2023, respectively). He is based in New Delhi. 

Maksud Ali Mondal
fading poems and the light, 2025
A work from the project ‘Synthesized Forest’, 2024 

Based on meticulous observation of minute organisms and systems, Maksud Ali Mondal reflects on the human dilemma of understanding and coexisting with other life forms. His book- and object-based contribution to AgriForum explores the materiality and generative potentials of chlorophyll, an elemental photosynthetic pigment, offering a sensory exploration of plant light-sensitivity and the values we assign to certain species over others. The book, fading poems and the light, embraces the alternative, sustainable photographic process of anthotype, using plant-based pigments to record overlooked flora in Amsterdam and the Rijksakademie garden. As leaf specimens and chlorophyll patches become living documents, the accompanying poems and notes reflect on the socio-political dimensions of plants and nature’s ephemerality. 
 
Mondal’s laboratory approach to the book extends into the exhibition space through a series of jars from his project Synthesized Forest, each containing raw chlorophyll extracted from various plants. Often referred to as the blood of plants, chlorophyll functions as a biological system mirroring the clotting of blood. Each sample reacts uniquely, shifting in shape, colour, and form under LED light, underscoring the vitality and individuality of the material. As the pigment clots and rots over time, the jars draw attention to the living nature of the medium and the disintegrative cycles of the natural world. 

Maksud Ali Mondal  (b. 1993, Bankura, West Bengal) has a practice that spans sculpture, installation, and photography, and reflects on the ways in which we understand ourselves in relation to one another, extending to other species, organisms, and civilisations. His work deals with microbial contamination as a conversational expression, based on the observation of growth, transformations, and the decomposition of organic matter. Mondal completed his BFA and MFA at Kala Bhavan, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. An awardee of the Micropia science museum in Amsterdam (2024), his accolades include an international award from the Kochi-Muziris Students’ Biennale (2019) and the Inlaks Fine Art Award (2021). Mondal has shown his work in exhibitions including Critical Zones at the Indian Museum, Kolkata (2023), Turning: On Field and Work at the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2023), and the Artissima Art Fair, Italy (2021), among others. Mondal is currently in residence at Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. 

Malavika Bhatia
Becoming With, 2025 

Malavika Bhatia’s Becoming With is a deck of interactive cards designed to be activated through their duality: one side of the card introduces a ‘queer’ organism or phenomenon, while the other side offers a sensory prompt for an embodied response, inviting writing, movement, sound, or simply attention. Rooted in queer ecological thought, Delhi-based forager and myco-enthusiast Bhatia’s project resists the framing of the more-than-human as strange, misunderstood, grotesque, or spectacular. Instead, it asks: what happens when we stop looking at queer nature and begin living with it? The creatures in this deck — fungi, amphibians, sea creatures, parasitic plants, and atmospheric phenomena — are not metaphors, but co-respondents to our lives and existences. Through ritual, repetition, reflection, and play, Becoming With proposes the idea of a relationship as practice — one that honours fluid identities and porous boundaries between the things we understand and those we do not, the many beings we are, and those that we could grow to become. 

Malavika Bhatia  (b. 1993, Delhi). ‘MycoDyke’ is the fungal alter ego of Malavika Bhatia, a self-taught mycologist, forager, and interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of ecology, queer culture, and alternative futures. Their practice blends storytelling, traditional ecological knowledge, and science communication to investigate themes of alienation, displacement, and transformation through the lens of human-fungal entanglements. Their work inhabits spaces of decay and decomposition, viewing these processes not as endpoints but as vital sites of regeneration and possibility. As India Program Lead for the Fungi Foundation, Bhatia leads ethnomycological research with Indigenous communities. They have facilitated experiences, walks, and workshops with institutions such as Science Gallery Bengaluru, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and Serendipity Arts Festival, and have exhibited at Gender Bender 2024 and the Listening Biennial 2025. Bhatia has contributed to Current Conservation, Atlas Obscura, and The Mushroom Project, as well as various artist books and zines. 

Niroj Satpathy
My modest village, 2025 

A processual mixed-media assemblage, Niroj Satpathy’s My modest village reflects on the unspoken histories of a small village in Odisha. Weaving together material, memory, and mark-making, Satpathy constructs spaces where the seen and unseen meet, where poetic form gives way to political insight. Working with hand-woven grass layered with Fuller’s earth, Satpathy evokes the textures of village life: its landscapes, rhythms, and fragile ecologies. Dried grass, flowers, and leaves edge the compositions, offering both a frame and a filter through which we view hand-drawn scenes of displacement, farmer suicides, caste violence, and the ongoing exploitation of land. An accompanying artist book bears witness to the uneven histories of neglect, resistance, and survival held in these materials. What emerges is both a portrayal of rural life and a reckoning with its persistent marginalisation. At its heart, the work draws from Chhota Mora Gaonti (My Little Village), a poem by Odia poet Sachidananda Rautray that has long shaped Satpathy’s sense of rural beauty and belonging. Yet nostalgia is never naïve here; instead, Satpathy listens closely to the land’s quiet murmurs, to what the soil remembers, and to what broken fragments still carry. In these delicate layers lie joy and grief, resilience and loss — truths not always visible, but nevertheless profoundly felt. 

Niroj Satpathy (b. 1986, Jajpur, Odisha). Incorporating drawings, paintings, and installations, Niroj Satpathy’s practice is centred around an obsessive engagement with materials designated as waste, and an exploration of their transformative, ephemeral, and expressive qualities. Satpathy’s five years as night supervisor at the MCD Solid Waste Management Department in Delhi (2013–2018) provided him with first-hand experience of waste as a lens through which to read the city. A graduate of BK Art College and Utkal University of Culture, Orissa, Satpathy has participated in various camps and residencies, and has created public art projects for Bakul Foundation, One Drop Foundation, and Sarai CSDS. His solo exhibition Dhalav was shown at Anant Art Gallery, Noida, in 2023, and his group exhibitions include Turning: On Field and Work at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2023), and Hangar for the Passerby at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2017). He lives and works in New Delhi, where his studio often doubles as a public space, hosting community gatherings, performances, and discussions. 

Rashmi Kaleka
Deemak, 2023 and 2025 

The set of drawings Deemak arises from the ephemeral mark-making processes developed by Rashmi Kaleka at her urban permaculture farm, Farm8, in New Delhi. Drawing on Kaleka’s close observations of the local termite Heterotermes — native to the Aravalli belt where the farm sits — the drawings take the insect as both subject and collaborator. What unfolds is a visual outcome of one of the site’s contingent strategies to engage with the non-human. The termite colonies — their sinuous paths and pulsating movements — are rendered tenderly, speculatively, and durationally over a map of Farm8. In this way, Kaleka counters urban cartographic impulses that seek to territorialise nature through eradication. These mappings — sensorial and shape-shifting — stem from her deep observation of the termite’s quiet conquest, seeing in their movements the work of local colonisers who reaffirm the unseen ecologies of belonging. Kaleka draws our attention to the termites’ overlooked labour: their capacity to break down tonnes of biomass and to recycle forest nutrients, a function that demands respect and understanding. In indexing these movements, Deemak reflects Farm8’s broader endeavour: to ‘habitat’ a spatial unity between species above and below ground, and to imagine a coexistence sustained not by control, but by relation. 

Rashmi Kaleka (b. 1957, Nairobi) is an artist and urban farmer whose practice draws from her observations and understanding of nature through sounds, visuals, and patterns of habitation and growth across different species. Kaleka’s practice is informed by sound, going back to her childhood in Kenya, where the rhythm and intonation of Swahili, Punjabi, and the tribal dialects of her grandparents permeated her consciousness. She studies and practises permaculture and is the founder of Farm8, a multifunctional space that serves as an urban farm, a kitchen, and a small space for discussion and learning. Kaleka’s work has been exhibited widely, including at the Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (2024), Helsinki City Art Museum (2012), the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (2012), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (2011), and the Kulthurhuset, Stockholm (2011). Rashmi Kaleka lives and works in New Delhi. 

Sanchayan Ghosh
The Landscape Shamiana, 2025 

The Landscape Shamiana builds on Sanchayan Ghosh’s longstanding engagement with space-making and the architectures of gathering. A shamiana is a shaded, flexible, temporary canopy for hosting events in tropical landscapes. Here, it becomes a vibrant structure that gently anchors the projects, interactions, and library interventions within the exhibition. Ghosh contextualises the shamiana as a spatial reflection of land, suspended between earth and sky as a dialogical, transformative space. Embracing a rectangular form and drawing on classical traditions of engaging with nature through geometry, the shamiana deconstructs that framework to evoke diverse cultural and geographical encounters with land. 
Overlaying the shamiana are important words drawn from the agrarian context, collected over various iterations of the AgriForum and now expanded upon by Ghosh. The words, scripted in various Indian languages as well as translations, render land as a verb, foregrounding its different aspects and practices as encounters with tools, methods, and natural phenomena. Serving as a transient site for the convergence of cultures, The Landscape Shamiana holds multiple memories and relationships, inviting conversations on varied notions and realities of landscapes. During across, with, nearby, it offers a structure for rest and dialogue, defining land as a site of praxis, material, body, and remembrance. 

Sanchayan Ghosh (b. 1970, Kolkata) has a site-specific practice involves extensive work in spatial design for experimental and contemporary theatre. Taking inspiration from community ritual events and pedagogical practice in Santiniketan, as well as his workshop experiences with Third Theatre exponent Badal Sarkar, Ghosh’s work also encompasses pedagogy, through workshops based around collective, interactive, and participatory processes of working and learning. In this way, he generates an interdisciplinary crossover of multiple practices in order to sustain a critical dialogue around land, labour, and landscape transformation. Ghosh received his MFA from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, in 1997 and currently works there as an associate professor in the Department of Painting. He has participated in several exhibitions and projects, including the Bengal Biennale (2024), Turning: On Field and Work at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2023), Under the Mango Tree at documenta 14 (2017), and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012. 

Sheshadev Sagria
A Being Between Wood, Bone and Soil, 2025
Moving Between Soil and Clod, 2025 

Exploring the interaction between body and tool in an agrarian landscape, Sheshadev Sagria documents the instruments and objects used by lower-caste labouring communities — how they mimic the workers’ limbs and movements and leave their marks upon the body. Sagria’s artist book, A Being Between Wood, Bone and Soil, dissects the body through annotated lithographs, overlaid with visceral watercolours and woodcut prints on fabric. The book focuses on the hybrid condition of the body-as-tool, tracing gestures and movements, and casting a critical eye on the illness and deformation often imposed on the labouring body through the acts of digging, ploughing, and breaking clods of earth. His documentary forays draw on the objective language of medical illustration, only to subvert it through a subaltern and ecological lens. 
This line of enquiry continues in Moving Between Soil and Clod, a wearable prosthetic made of wood and leather — natural materials commonly used in tool-making. Clod-like in texture and structure, the extended arm embodies the Earth, its primordial spirit and strength. Accentuated by Sagria’s choice of medium, the arm-as-tool invites reflection on the toiling body and its performativity. Drawing many intersecting lines between word, limb, tool, health, ecosystem, and movement, Sagria methodically unpacks the ideologies and knowledge systems that shape them. 

Sheshadev Sagria (b. 1996, Balangir, Odisha). Working across printmaking, sculpture, and multimedia installations, Sheshadev Sagria delves into the complexities of caste hierarchies, labour dynamics, and the intersections of medical and historical knowledge. From an empirical and local perspective drawing on knowledge of his village in Orissa, Sagria challenges existing frameworks and presents alternative realities of marginalised bodies and their alienated condition in remote areas. Sagria holds a BFA in printmaking from the Government College of Art & Crafts, Khallikote, Orissa, and an MFA in printmaking from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. A recipient of the Prince Claus Fund SEED Award (2024) and the Inlaks Fine Art Award (2023), Sagria has contributed to numerous exhibitions, including Sustaina 2 at STIR Art Gallery, New Delhi (2025), Imaginarium 3.0 at Emami Art, Kolkata (2023), Pushing Print at Artbuzz Studio, New Delhi (2019), and the Kochi-Muziris Students’ Biennale (2017). He is based in Orissa. 

Shubham Kumar
Suddenly and slowly I existed forever-II, 2022 

Fragile Beauty, 2025 

In his suite of paintings Suddenly and Slowly I Existed Forever-II, Shubham Kumar addresses the socio-political erasure of difference and diversity by focusing on the fraught presence of Oryza rufipogon, a resilient, weedy variety of rice found across India. Tenderly rendered, Kumar documents its scattered presence on the field, employing blurring to mirror the crop’s wilful destruction by farmers. The species is re-centred in an accompanying frame, where, through isolatory strategies that borrow from the languages of realism and reportage, it is brought into focus as a vital genetic resource whose contribution to biodiversity remains crucial. 
Proposing a form of counter-reportage, Kumar’s book Fragile Beauty traces the turmoil faced by floriculturists and the yielding soil. Structured episodically and unfolding through dialogue, the book employs comparative analysis across hand-painted spreads, where diverse realities converge through image, story, and speech. A quiet inner dialogue unfolds on the market value of flowers, cycles of production, and the use of fertilisers, contextualised by the reflections of a Baroda-based floriculturist. Through this, Kumar moves through the aesthetic, ritualistic, and celebratory tones of floriculture, grounding them in the socio-political forces and ecological pressures shaping contemporary agrarian landscapes. 

Shubham Kumar (b. 1995, Gaya, Bihar). Tracing the politics of farmland, construction, and regional violence in Murera and Gaya, Bihar, Shubham Kumar deploys images, ideas, and creatures from his native land as metaphors through which to understand the complex ideological narratives that have been imposed on the life of the region. His work problematises the documentary image through para-fictions, painting, image transfer, and installations. Kumar studied painting at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. A recipient of several awards, including the Tacita Dean Award (2022), he has undertaken residencies at Khoj Peers (2021) and the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (2019). Kumar’s solo show Ghare, Khet, Dera opened at Latitude 28, New Delhi, in 2022, and he has contributed to several group exhibitions, including Kodachrome Memories at Modern Art Gallery, New Delhi (2024), Inscapes at Bikaner House, New Delhi (2023), and the Kochi-Muziris Students’ Biennale (2021). He lives and works in Vadodara, Gujarat. 

Umesh Singh 

अकुराईल देह वोला लोग जे काल्ह ख़ातिर बिया लेके घूमात बा
(People with sprouted bodies carrying seeds for tomorrow), 2025 

Forms derived from the field — sculptural, fluid, and adaptable — take shape in Umesh Singh’s practice as meditations on resistance, protest, farming, voice, visibility, and the urgency of collective action. Singh’s haptic engagement with mud, clay, wood, text, and image becomes a way to think both spatially and historically, summoning indigeneity, disappearing traditions, and embodied ways of remembering with the land. In People with sprouted bodies carrying seeds for tomorrow, Singh draws on Indigenous knowledge systems of the Bhojpur region of Bihar, reimagining traditional acts of collecting, storing, and remembering. He turns to the kothila — a vernacular structure used to store both dry grains and wet produce — as a generative form. In his hands, the kothila becomes a vessel of cultural continuity, survival, and adaptation, shaped by, and in the service of, a community’s relation to land and labour. Here, the sculptural form extends into the conceptual — into ideas of containment, of what it means to hold and to preserve. Moving away from embellishment and adornment, Singh foregrounds the receptacle not as a passive vessel, but as a critical site of holding — of memory, sustenance, grief, resistance. The container becomes an active archive, bearing the weight of what is gathered, what is safeguarded, and what is carried forward. 

Umesh Singh (b. 1992, Bhojpur, Bihar) is a visual arts practitioner, scholar, activist, and native of Bihar, whose work maps a dialogue between agrarian metaphors and the actuality of socio-political and religious hierarchies in Bhojpur. Through printmaking, performance, photography, poetry, and site-specific installations incorporating a range of found organic materials and tools, he articulates the strife of agrarian livelihoods in relation to education, agrarian policies, and environmental politics. Singh studied painting at the Banaras Hindu University and printmaking at the SN School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad. His accolades and residencies include the Tata Trust International Award of the Kochi-Muziris Students’ Biennale (2019) and the Arthshila X Khoj Artists Residency (2022), and he has participated in group exhibitions including India Art Fair (2025), Broken Foot, Unfolding Inequalities (online, with Artists United Collective, 2020), and Call to Disorder at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2019). 

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A spread from a book with textile or paper pages displaying organic shapes printed in dark gray and black. The shapes resemble fragments of roots, bones, or abstract organic structures. Small inscriptions in a non-Latin script point to different parts of the figures.
© Sheshadev Sagria / AgriForum Sheshadev Sagria, A being between wood, bone and soil, 2025, Lithograph print, watercolour, drawing on paper and fabric.