DCAW 2026: In Conversation With Curator Adwait Singh On Climate Change And Contemporary Indian Art

Adwait Singh (AS): It’s true that a number of my curatorial enquiries start with an intuition, framed as a preliminary set of questions used as points of departure. This is followed by a search for relevant artistic practitioners, who can help me expand this enquiry. Although I like to lead with a more or less clear conceptual brief at the beginning, I am careful to leave enough room for the artists to find their own points of interest, which can be unspooled in accordance with their practices. Like the monsoonal winds picking up moisture as they pass over bodies of water, the enquiry thickens with the accretion of various artistic interests. It also tightens over the course of this interactive journey, assuming its final shape and sensibility as the works start to emerge. Often, this journey deposits us in a different place from where we started. Even when the initial questions are retained, the emergent perspectives often stipulate a reframing.

AS: To be fair, the spectacular—or, more precisely, the sublime—are key drivers behind the project, given that these thoughts arose from my own observations of unseasonal storms, heightened by a recent move to the countryside. Ideas of the Kantian sublime—or compelling natural phenomena that defy description—meet Amitav Ghosh’s observations about contemporary fiction’s failure to pin down extreme weather events in the curatorial brief. In this way, the sublime is very present within the show, even when it remains in the background as allusions to different storms the artists have witnessed in some way. One could even say, the exhibition is plotted between various storms—the 1971 super cyclone that hit the coast of Odisha, the 1978 Delhi tornado, the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone, and the more recent Cyclone Hudhud (2014) and Cyclone Asani (2022) that hit South Andaman. The interludes between these storms allow for more mundane engagements with the monsoon, if no less significant. So for instance, there are the quickly executed watercolours by Treibor Mawlong that, on the surface, capture the misty transformation of a Meghalayan landscape while at the same time gesturing towards the changing rainfall patterns in the wettest place on Earth (according to an Indian Meteorological Department report from earlier in the year, the state was experiencing one of its driest monsoons with a 58 percent rainfall deficit). In this manner, small, personal observations become the exhibition’s way of entering conversations or processing events that can be too big or overwhelming otherwise.

AS: Historical research is important to me to the degree that it serves the needs of storytelling. That said, the manner of research entailed in the show probably looks a lot different than scientific modes of research. The curatorial research is primarily governed by the needs of the stories being amassed and crystallised through the exhibition's umbrella. Then the artists have their own individual modes of researching. Subsequently, my job as a curator entails drawing these individual story arcs into a larger narrative—a task that requires a balancing of interests between the parts and the whole. Sometimes, the viewpoint that a particular artwork brings to the exhibition demands minor readjustments, the better to align with the overarching exhibition framework. At other times, my personal research melds with and builds on artistic research, carving new facets within the exhibition. For example, my interest in Greek history brought certain mythological aspects to bear on a multi-panel work by Mojahid Musa, Hippocampus (2026). This recombinant eco-historical framing of the work retroactively helped me consolidate the various mythical, cultural and environmental references within the broader curatorial note.

AS: Artistic research generally entails a different track as opposed to scientific enquiries. While both may advance evidence towards particular ends, the nature of that evidence, the way it is gathered, and how it performs can vary significantly. Artistic research can bring different disciplinary knowledge to exfoliate each other, thereby illuminating the shortcomings of particular epistemic modes. Lately, scientific notions of objectivity have garnered critique from thinkers like Donna Haraway for concealing biases that are often Western, white and male. This is not to discredit scientific epistemologies but to shed light on the systems and motivations (for instance the military-industrial complex) setting the tone to these enquiries through sponsorship. By foregrounding alternative knowledge and opening a space for criticality, artistic research can enable the asking of certain questions that would otherwise remain inadmissible under prevailing norms. And to the degree that cultural discourse determines which techno-scientific proposals are approved and supported, artistic research can influence how we relate in/to the world.

AS: I feel that the sense of crisis in climate reporting is not entirely unmerited. There’s certainly cause for worry, given how we’re imminently headed for the catastrophic 2-degree rise in global temperatures, which may very well wipe out half of humanity, to say nothing of the toll it would take on our companion species. To pretend otherwise is to be delusional, or ‘deranged’ as Amitav Ghosh puts it. The situation is serious enough that we should all be screaming it from our rooftops, seeing as how our administrations and businesses, or our incorporated governments to be more precise, are giving little indications of catching up to these sobering facts. With that being said, I am aware that crises are often exploited to push policies that would be downright inhuman or insane outside of the exigent circumstances within which they may appear sensible. Concerns like these and thoughts of effective mobilisation command more tactful phrasings of the situation and call to action. 

In Bye-Bye Monsoon we wanted to stay with the catastrophe while asking ourselves what it is about the sublime which defies imagination. In practice, this meant that descriptions of extreme weather, its complex causality and ramifications, not to mention the boggling scale, had to be presented beyond statistics, beyond mainstream media lingo, in ways that would be relatable at a visceral and personal level. So we had all these reports and data about the ongoing El Niño and the monsoonal belt shifting southwards on account of the disruption of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, but the challenge was to transcribe these scientific reports to a form that would make the threat visible in all its diffuseness, thereby engendering a more empathetic relation to these figures that are touted to hoarseness by the weatherman. Telling the story from different vantages became a key for us towards that goal.           

AS: I don’t think of curation as a one-way street. At the start of a project the artists are selected carefully for the relevance of their practices, or their responsiveness to the idea that you’re thinking of extrapolating through the exhibition. Thus, I see it more as a gathering of similar interests under an overarching umbrella, whose exact delineations emerge from that confluence. When I start my correspondence with the artists, I try to sketch out the idea in as much detail as possible while asking the artists to respond to the brief in a way that makes sense for their current research interests and larger practice. Not infrequently, their responses require an expansion of the curatorial purview (a soft sculpture by Paula Sengupta would be a case in point, given how it made us think about colonial attitudes and practices, and their impingements upon the current climate crisis). Occasionally, an artist’s contribution may offer a counterpoint to the exhibition and it might be worthwhile cultivating this antithetical note in the interest of nuancing the argument.  

To cite another example, Mansha Chhatwal’s practice is about bookburning and censorship and is anchored by the use of wax as a medium. For this show, we encouraged the artist to think of the subconscious ways in which the changing monsoon might be affecting/interrupting her practice or the conditions thereof. As it turned out, the artist was already a part of a group of local citizens vocalising their concerns for the mangrove ecologies jeopardised by the construction of the Versova-Bhayandar link of the Mumbai Coastal Road. She was already looking to do something about the issue although it hadn’t entered her practice yet. Once the common ground was established, it became a matter of finding a compelling articulation from within her aesthetics. What has resulted is a haunting encaustic tapestry of the road—a monumental gravestone for the birds and critters that are set to be—have already been perhaps—un-homed by the project.

AS: Given the state of our public art institutions and funding, I hope that private initiatives like DCAW can continue to make room for independent and experimental practices that may rely on them for sustenance but remain vital, nevertheless, to the health of the arts ecology at large. My hope is for contemporary art to be seen and acknowledged as a delicate ecology, a mutualistic medley of parts that come together as a whole. We need art now, more than ever, to embrace its transformative and truth-telling function, readying us for the great changes to come.