New Delhi, Feb 3 (PTI) In artist Mrugen Rathod's sculptural installation, more than 540 lions, coloured a bright saffron hue typical of the popular Kesar mango of Gir, walk outward in a concentric circle, leaving it to the viewer to interpret their movement as reclaiming of ancestral territory or an exodus out of their habitat forced by human interference.
“Mari Vaadi Ma” by Rathod is part of the 3rd edition of Sustain India Exhibition at Bikaner House here. A collaborative initiative by think tank Council of Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) and artist duo Thukral & Tagra, the exhibition, titled “Bitter Nectar”, examines climate change through the lens of fruiting cycles, food systems, and abundance.
Rathod, a visual artist and educator from Gujarat whose art practice focuses on integrating research of Gir forest and the ecologies of Sabarmati, Vishwamitri and Mahisagar rivers with conversations with local communities, reflects on mango monocultures, forest ecologies, and human and animal displacement through the installation rooted in the Gir landscape.
Thukral & Tagra noted that on the one hand, wildlife conservation has become limited to protection of a single species and on the other, cultivation is centred around a single cash crop, the Kesar mango.
“That is the bitterness of the nectar. We all are after this pursuit of sweetness. But what happens with this sweetness, if it ends up hurting us? There is a dichotomy to which we are living. There is pollution, but I am still in Delhi, right? We all know there are certain things but we end up doing it,” the artist duo and curators of the exhibition told PTI.
Rathod’s work reflects upon the increasingly common practice of farmers inviting tourists to their homestays under the mango orchards, with a promise to spot the Gir Lion, who are now inhabiting non-forest and buffer-zone territories.
“So it's kind of like an addiction or stickiness of something. It's also peeling the layers of fruit and going back to the roots to understand the complexity and the entanglement of this complexity and how each and every tiny thing changes when a certain degree of temperature shifts,” they said.
The theme of “Bitter Nectar” takes centre stage as a thematic anchor, reshaping how everyday elements such as food, taste, labour, and seasonal abundance are perceived.
Apart from Rathod, the exhibition features two other Sustaina India Fellows, whose practices are rooted in distinct geographies and materials.
Vedant Patil, a filmmaker and PhD candidate based in western Uttar Pradesh, traces the fragile journeys of milk across rural and urban landscapes in his work “Spillage to Spoilage”, revealing the invisible labour, infrastructure, and ecological pressures that sustain everyday consumption.
Anuja Dasgupta, an artist and agripreneur based in Ladakh, uses the apricot – a keystone of the region's ecology – to explore interdependence, seasonal knowledge, and climate vulnerability in high-altitude communities.
A Ladakhi household spread across a puzzle board, crafted from repurposed poplar wood, is Dasgupta’s work titled “(Re)Frame”.
Anchoring land, memory, and seasonal rhythms that extend outward, the images trace the apricot's cycle, as participants move through a terrain shaped by cultivation, climate, and everyday labour, where domestic and ecological processes remain inseparable.
Upon completing the puzzle board, which invites viewers to engage, the act of sharing an apricot seed shifts experience from vision to taste, situating the body within the cycles that the work reveals.
As heat and harvest no longer arrive in agreement; erratic rains interrupt ripening, winters soften or arrive out of turn, and long-held agricultural knowledge is unsettled, the exhibition traces through these temporal mismatches how fractures in climate systems travel outward, affecting labour, ecology, consumption, and community life.
“Sustaina peels through urgent questions of climate change, tracing the shifting knowledge of fruiting cycles strained by extreme heat, erratic rainfall, and uncertainty by the means of artistic practice.
“Bringing together works from across India, from Ladakh to Kerala and Assam to Gujarat, the exhibition maps a shared ecology of climate action and inquiry into our desire for sweetness, into the nuances of nectar collection,” Thukral & Tagra added.
Alongside the Fellows’ projects, the exhibition also features artists whose works engage with climate change through diverse lenses.
While Abhinand Kishore’s “Aazhi Thozhil: Sinking land, floating labourers” examines urbanisation and climate stress in Kochi through layered visual archives that trace water, land, labour, and infrastructure across the city’s fragile edges, Lakshita Munjal explores material memory and heat adaptation in “Cooling with a Chair” through sculptural seating objects rooted in everyday practices of cooling and care.
Sidhant Kumar addresses labour, pollution, and visibility in the city through a performative film, titled “My Flesh is Afraid”, that reflects on construction bans, air quality, and precarity.
Other artists include Smita Minda, who brings a deeply personal perspective through animation; Harmeet Singh Rattan, who collaborates with his father to explore memory, taste, and preservation through a material dialogue with the desi keekar tree; Pooja Kalai, who engages with textile waste and indigenous weaving practices; and Ankur Yadav, who responds to extractive landscapes in Rajasthan through eco-poetry created at abandoned mining sites.
The exhibition will come to an end on February 15.