Annalisa Mansukhani’s DCAW 2026 project This Animate Earth reframes plants as archives of caste, empire, gender and memory rather than mere aesthetic objects. Drawing on feminist, Indigenous and Dalit scholarship, she links tending and botanical labour to erased knowledge systems, arguing that weeds, pavements and pastures reveal extractive laws, land degradation and our broken relationships to place and custodianship.
While for Eliot, the Shadow falls somewhere between the conception and creation and between emotion and response, for Annalisa Mansukhani, her curatorial project This Animate Earth for DCAW 2026 falls uniquely somewhere between a herbarium sheet and a protest placard. Housed in the Main Building of Bikaner House, it runs alongside Adwait Singh's Bye-Bye Monsoon which sits in the LTC building and six gallery presentations at the CCA. However, where Bye-Bye Monsoon reads the sky, Mansukhani has her eyes fixed lower: on the humus, on the pavement crack, the pressed leaf and on the weed nobody bothered to name.
Speak to her for any length of time and you’ll come out with the knowledge the exhibition isn’t as much about plants dressed up to look serious as it is an argument, dexterously devised, that there is a way after all to read the botanical world as telling assemblages of caste, empire, gender and memory. It has always been there, we simply weren't trained to read it that way.
Mansukhani's route into botany takes a rather Derridean scepticism of archives: what gets remembered, and by whom. "Institutions tend to privilege what can be named, classified and preserved within an established system, but there are other ways of knowing that reside in oral histories, domestic practices and embodied relationships to place," she says. "I am interested in what that kind of proximity produces — a proximity to ways of knowing that are often rendered peripheral."
She traces this back to a time of research into photographic archives, and to a labour she thinks has gone almost entirely uncredited. "A lot of family photography is tended to by women, but that labour, or even an acknowledgement of it, is still far from being brought into dialogue with other conversations around photography," she says. To add flesh to this argument, she evokes scholarship coming out of India's North East, "regions that don't necessarily feature in how we write a history of photography in India." As she puts it: "The archival impulse there, to build and to remember, is being foregrounded by several incredible scholars, many of them women, who are returning to this question of what finds a place within the institutional narrative, and whether that inclusion is needed at all. Maybe we need to dismantle the existing structure to produce dialogue and access in vastly different ways."
It is precisely at this juncture that she introduces botany, and that she does through the phenomenological study of ‘tending.’ For her in this curation at DCAW, botany turns into a vessel for "observing, tending to and recording plants" that "has often been feminised, domesticated or made anonymous." She is at pains not to romanticise it either: "When thinking with the botanical, I wanted to extend beyond thinking of it as fragile or transient and instead think about the forms of knowledge and learning that it engenders."
And underneath all of it—the tending, the knowing, the world-building, the dwelling—there lurks a warning that it is currently being lost. "What we are seeing now, constantly, is a degradation of land that has historically been tended to by communities. What I feel is also happening alongside this is an erasure of the knowledge they hold and their ways of living with environments," she says. "I think what we are losing, ultimately, are relationships to place. These have never been supplementary; they've always been knowledge-making in themselves."
Ask Mansukhani what the botanical reveals that a more direct social critique might miss, and her answer arrives with the precision of someone who has thought about this for a long time. "To follow the life of a plant is therefore to follow the systems around it — who grows it, who harvests it, who has access to it, what is protected, what is displaced and what is deemed expendable," she says. "In India, these relationships are inseparable from histories of caste and colonialism, and also inseparable from the realities of gender."
Her diagnosis of what surrounds all this growing and harvesting is telling if blunt. "We clearly don't privilege the grower enough to listen to their stories; our laws and policies are so deeply anti-land, anti-custodianship and extractive that it becomes important to look instead at the network of what is actually being affected," she says — insisting, too, on valuing "ecologies that don't centre us — wildernesses, pastures, open land that grows of its own accord." Legislation, labour and extraction, she argues, get "inscribed into landscapes — and, well, the aftermath of what happens when we bleed them dry."
If one is willing enough to dig deeper, Mansukhani, unlike most other curators, will hand you her bibliography generously, and it is worth lingering on. Anna Atkins anchors it — "the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images, and, according to some accounts, the first woman to create a photograph" — whose cyanotypes of British algae she returns to for "the way she brought together observation, classification and an almost intimate attentiveness to the botanical world." Alongside her sits Eireann Lorsung's essay on Dürer's watercolour The Great Piece of Turf — a piece, Mansukhani says, about "what happens when we decide that something ordinary is worthy of looking at."
Robin Wall Kimmerer looms large too. Here, "the plant is a participant in a network of exchange; roots, fungi, insects, soil and climate produce forms of intelligence and reciprocity that exceed the individual organism." On another note, the essay collection In the Garden, whose fourteen writers, including Penelope Lively and Jamaica Kincaid, trace "gardening as inheritance, refuge and shared language." Then there are the poets and novelists (my favourites bit) including Temsula Ao, Natalie Diaz, Easterine Kire, Mamang Dai, for whom, Mansukhani says, "the land becomes memory and ancestor... a stone, a river or a medicinal herb can hold memory in the way an oral history does." Of Mamang Dai specifically, she notes: "She eventually began moving away from more human-centred themes to make non-human nature — both flora and fauna — the central concern, reflecting on the value systems driving their decline."
And running beneath all of this, unavoidably, is caste. "Gail Omvedt's Why Dalits Dislike Environmentalists first named the rift for me: mainstream Indian environmentalism, rooted in upper-caste and Gandhian ideals of simplicity and nature-reverence, has historically ignored how caste itself structures who gets to have a 'pure' relationship with land, versus who is made to labour in its dirt and who is allowed to stake a claim on it," she says. "Caste is very much an integral part of any ecological discourse, and not just a social citation."
With ecological themes now fashionable currency in contemporary art, Mansukhani is unsentimental about telling the difference between the real thing and set dressing. "The distinction lies in whether ecology is being treated as a subject or as a method of thinking," she says. "Can we sit with and reconsider relationships: between human and non-human life, between land and labour, between growth and extraction, between what is visible and what sustains it invisibly?"
She wants the botanical to work "as a structure rather than an aesthetic," and is refreshingly candid that her own exhibition hasn't fully escaped the pull of prettiness. "There is still a long way to go in how we really attend to what exists beyond the surface of what we see," she admits. She also names a gap she considers still rare in the Indian art circuit: "The botanical is an incredibly queer site of enquiry, particularly in the ways plants think through resilience, community and beauty. These intersections are still quite rare in the Indian art circuit because the systems we have continue to adhere to very formal norms of what looks and sounds good."
Thinking with roots and pollinators, Mansukhani says, has rewired how she thinks about people too. "A plant does not grow independently; its becoming is produced through a dense network of dependencies. There is no singular agent at the centre of that system," she says. "Thinking through this offers another geometry for understanding human relationships, moving away from ideas of autonomy and towards questions of reciprocity, dependency and mutual becoming." She sees real institutional stakes in this, "particularly at a moment when so many of our political and social structures are organised around extractive vocabularies," adding that words like "roots, pollination, symbiosis, interdependence... ask us to slow down, to lean into the processual, and to think about what it means to build processes adequate to our moment of polycrisis."
Rather than reaching for a single theoretical scaffold, Mansukhani says the idea of attention grew out of practice itself. "Botanical art has produced one of humanity's longest traditions of sustained looking. To observe a plant closely is to enter a different temporality — to notice growth, decay, dispersal, return, latency," she says. "Attention is not neutral. What we choose to look at, what we linger beside, and what we allow ourselves to hear are already forms of positioning... an ecology of attention is also a politics of attention."
It is this shift in noticing, rather than any tidy conclusion, that she hopes visitors carry out of Bikaner House. "I would like viewers to think about what their most ordinary act of looking is. To have someone leave noticing the plant growing through a pavement, the weed at the edge of a wall, the tree they have passed a hundred times without really seeing," she says. The works, she insists, "are incredibly beautiful too, and they deserve that acknowledgement," but the plant, in her framing, is not decoration. It is, as she wrote in her curatorial note, "an agential and itinerant form... something that moves, exceeds intention and participates in the making of worlds." Perhaps, she says, "the shift is simply from looking at something to looking with it. And from there, to consider not just where we direct our attention, but what we do with what we see."
This Animate Earth, curated by Annalisa Mansukhani, opened on August 31 at the Main Building, Bikaner House, as part of Delhi Contemporary Art Week 2026, running until 5 September.