bitter nectar
Sustaina 3, 1 to 15 Feb 2026,
Bikaner House, New Delhi
In the third year of Sustaina India, Bitter Nectar examines the politics and complexities embedded in a seemingly simple desire: the pursuit of sweetness, of fruit harvested at its most perfect moment of ripeness. Climate change and its profound impacts are understood here in tandem with fruiting cycles, seasonal rhythms, and systems of sustenance. Through this lens, the exhibition traces shifting tastes and conditions, expanding our understanding of the tensions and contradictions inherent in what it means to be a “fruit” within today’s socio-ecological and political landscape.
The exhibition invites us to embrace discrepancy, to attend to the asynchronous. Heat and harvest no longer arrive in agreement, erratic rains disrupt ripening, leaving residues of excess and absence, and quietly redrawing the logic of seasons. Winter’s shift softens, or arrives out of turn, unsettling cycles once held as knowledge. These temporal mismatches, when left unresolved, reveal layered relationships between climate, labour, ecology, and consumption. A fracture at a single point travels outward, spreading uncertainty across interconnected bodies, species, and systems. In this disarray, even those seemingly removed become participants, bound by shifts they did not choose, yet must learn to inhabit.
This year’s three fellows work with milk, apricot, and mango, each rooted in a distinct geography. Together with invited artists, they revisit the idea of nectar- collecting through various social, political, and historical references. Their practices peel back the hidden meanings embedded in labour, extraction, and consumption, collectively building a situated form of knowledge that foregrounds interdependence, vulnerability, and resilience across human and more-than-human worlds.
Curated by Thukral & Tagra
Organised by Mihir Shah, Milan George Jacob, Vidusshi Pathak, Shruthi Pillai (Council on Energy, Environment and Water)
Curatorial Assistance
Manasvita Maddi
Anuja Dasgupta | Sustaina India Fellow, Gameplay installation with homegrown kernels, 2026
Anuja Dasgupta is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and social entrepreneur holding a BA (H) in English Literature from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi, and an MA in Visual Art from Ambedkar University, Delhi.
Title of the work: (Re)Frame
Ladakh, intimately tied to Dasgupta’s sense of place, unfolds across a puzzle board crafted from repurposed poplar wood, where the site becomes both material and structure. A Ladakhi household sits at the centre of the board, anchoring land, memory, and seasonal rhythms that extend outward. Tracing the apricot’s cycle, participants move through a terrain shaped by cultivation, climate*, and everyday labour, where domestic and ecological processes remain inseparable. The grid, central to her photographic practice, operates as both guide and horizon, directing movement while expanding perception, unsettling the ways Ladakh is typically framed within the visual economy. Upon completion, the act of sharing an apricot seed shifts experience from vision to taste, situating the body within the cycles that the work reveals. In the fate of this fruit is the fact that the pressure of climate change is not merely an abstraction, but an intimate and ongoing reality.
*The Leh region, where Sham Valley, often called the “Apricot Valley” in Ladakh is located, has seen an increase in very hot days and very warm nights as well as changes in rainfall patterns due to the climate crisis.
Mrugen Rathod | Sustaina India Fellow, sculpture installation, 2026.
Mrugen Rathod completed his BFA and MFA in sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Vadodara. A visiting faculty member at Nirma University and Anant National University since 2019, his art practice extends beyond the studio, focusing on integrating research of Gir forest and the ecologies of Sabarmati, Vishwamitri, and Mahisagar rivers with conversations with local communities and related institutions.
Title of the work:
મારી વાડીમાં / Mari Vaadi ma
Gir today is structured by two quiet yet persuasive economic consolidations: conservation of wildlife reduced to a single protected species and cultivation organised around a single cash crop. Common conversations, where farmers invite tourists to their homestays, enveloped and hidden by the evergreen foliage of the mango orchards, with a promise to spot the Gir Lion, becomes a point from which this work unfolds. They serve as embedded corroboration to Rathod’s research on the blurring boundaries between forest and farm land. More than 500 Kesari lion sculptures register the shifting distribution of the species, as many now inhabit non-forest and buffer-zone territories dominated by mango orchards. Mounted on wheels, with a ring loop on the neck and tinted by the fruit, the lions move through a landscape in transition, where ecologies are altered from grasslands to orchards. The work leaves open whether this movement signals a reclaiming of ancestral territory or a compelled adaptation to scarcity.
The installation traces these tensions without resolving them. In the figure of the “aam-sher” ecological change, cultural memory, and survival converge, allowing the pressures of conservation, cultivation and extraction to be experienced as something lived rather than an abstract construct.
Vedant Patil | Sustaina India Fellow, Film, 2026
Vedant Patil is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Shiv Nadar University, studying the cultural economies of milk across Delhi’s urban-rural continuum and Western Uttar Pradesh. Through ethnographic fieldwork with dairy cooperatives, informal traders, and bovine herds, he examines how ecological systems, political economies, and infrastructures shape milk as both substance and social practice.
Title of the work: Spillage to Spoilage
Vedant’s daily train commute to Delhi rendered visible the circulation of milk through the Delhi-NCR, revealing a network of labour, transport, and urban demand through which the city sustains itself. The consistent presence of milkmen moving through these routes became the basis for his inquiry into how nourishment is produced, transported, and consumed. Milk, integral and invisibly foundational to the ethos of many anthropological practices, attaches itself to purity, masculinity and completeness, becoming the centre of myth and life. As consumption has shifted from drinking to eating, patterns of use have begun to register widening inequalities. Urban households now consume nearly 30 per cent more milk per capita than rural ones, despite production remaining largely rural, while the wealthiest urban consumers likely exceed recommended intake by more than double. These increasing demands of immediate sustenance increasingly sit in tension with the limits of ecological sustainability. At the same time, expanding urbanisation and freight corridors continue to reconfigure dairy production, pushing farmers and supply chains outward. Through the Ras and Chaas of this deceptively simple liquid, Vedant’s film holds these pressures in suspension, tracing how care, extraction, and climate issues** converge in the material life of milk.
**According to a CEEW study, 54 per cent of buffalo rearers, 50 per cent of crossbred rearers, and 41 per cent of indigenous cattle rearers in India report climate-related impacts. For the rearers, these include higher disease incidence, mortality, and heat-induced stress and restlessness in their animals.
Abhinand Kishore is a researcher and visual artist whose practice brings together political analysis and sensory inquiry. Trained in Electronics and Communication Engineering, with an MA in International Relations and Political Science from the Central University of Kerala.
Title of the work: Aazhi Thozhil: Sinking land, floating labourers. Medium: Mixed media, ink on paper
The work frames Kochi as a socio-ecological terrain shaped by urbanisation, climate stress, and uneven development. Through a collage of drawings, maps, and ethnographic fragments, it traces how water, land, labour, and capital flow across coastal edges, wetlands, transport corridors and informal settlements. It records not only physical transformation but also the sensory and political conditions of life on city’s fringes, including flooding, pollution, displacement, and infrastructural neglect. Situated in Kerala’s Ernakulam district, which has witnessed a five-fold increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme floods since 2010, Kochi emerges here as a fractured urban archive, revealing how climate change and infrastructure reshape the city through the lives of those who remain at its edges.
Ankur Yadav is an artist and poet based between Rajasthan, India, and Maastricht, Netherlands. Trained as a painter, his practice extends across film, poetry, and site-responsive installations, engaging grief, loss, and resistance in relation to extractive capitalism, colonial knowledge systems, and regional politics shaping his native Behror.
Title of the work: On the old one. Medium: Photographs on archival paper
The work responds to the loss of nature, an intervention that disrupted river flows and quietly reconfigured the region’s ecological and cultural fabric, as industrialisation continues to reshape how land and resources are perceived and used, often without question.
Conceived as an ongoing project, it takes the form of eco-poetry written in and around abandoned sites and public spaces, addressing those whose labour is bound to the land. In recent iterations, the artist returns to photograph the poems as they weather and erode, allowing time to become a material within the work. This gradual degradation mirrors the slow violence of extraction, reinforcing the project’s intent to make environmental loss visible as an ongoing process rather than a single event.
Lakshita Munjal is an architect and visual artist based in Gurgaon. She holds a BArch from CEPT University, Ahmedabad, and an MA in Printmaking from the Royal Collegeof Art, London, where her practice beganto integrate art and architecture through sculptural furniture and objects. Her practice is driven by an interest in circularity, exploring how materials carry memory, labour, and value.
Title of the work: Cooling with a chair. Medium: Re-purposed objects
This project proposes a series of objects designed using a combination of naturaland waste materials commonly used in local communities to mitigate extreme heat. As over half of India’s districts (home to nearly 75 percent of the population) now face high to very high heat risk, the work draws on traditional practices and street-level ingenuity to reimagine seating as both a shelter and a cooling device. The chair becomes more than just a place of rest; it offers comfort, mobility, and a sense of care in harsh urban conditions. Accompanied by a kit of heat-relieving objects, the project invites people to reconsider what sustainability can look like when it’s rooted in the everyday.
Sidhant Kumar is a multidisciplinary artist from Pachokhar, Bihar, currently based in Delhi. His practice approaches land as a living archive, and engages landscapes not as neutral sites but as socio-political terrains shaped by caste, labour, displacement, and ecological strain.
Title of the work: My Flesh is Afraid. Medium: Film
This performative film takes the green construction net as a metaphor for the erasure of labour within Delhi’s urban economy. As air pollution triggers construction bans in winter, survival itself becomes regulated, with workers penalised for continuing to earn a living. While buildings are veiled to signal environmental compliance, labouring communities are similarly obscured, turning concealment into a mode of governance. By proposing the net as a second skin, the work asks whether visibility and the right to exist in the city have become conditional. The film highlights that those least responsible for pollution suffer the most economically from pollution control measures.
Smita Minda, born and raised in New Delhi, India, after a stint in advertising, graduated from CalArts’ Character Animation Program in 2021.
Title of the work: Everyday.
Medium: Film
“Everyday” is a short film that traces the psychological weight of climate anxiety as it intrudes into the ordinary rhythms of a young woman’s life. Set during a birthday lunch, this personal work follows how media saturation and environmental crisis filter perception, making even moments of intimacy and celebration feel unsettling. Developed as the artist’s thesis film at CalArts, the work portrays climate change not only as an external condition but as an internal, emotional landscape shaped by constant exposure to catastrophe.
Harmeet Singh Rattan is an artist based between Punjab and Delhi. Trained as a sculptor, his practice spans material, memory, and site-responsive installations, engaging with grief, loss, and resistance in relation to knowledge systems and regional politics.
Title of the work: Pickled – Diptych
Medium: Tree bark + food
In this work, Rattan collaborates with his father, a sign painter who continues to run one of the last remaining studios of its kind in the region. A fallen piece of bark of the desi keekar (acacia) becomes the shared material through which father and son negotiate memory, labour, and purpose. The bark anchors the installation, acting as both an object and an archive, from which ink, pigment, and taste are extracted. Through a tasting menu centred on the fruit of the keekar, complemented by hand-painted plates marked with ink derived from its skin, the work treats preservation as a form of “knowledge pickling”, where taste becomes a medium through which memory is made and sustained.
ਰੁੱਖ ਸਿਰਫ਼ ਛਾਂ ਨਹੀਂ ਹੁੰਦੇ,
ਉਹ ਇਤਿਹਾਸ ਵੀ ਯਾਦ ਰੱਖਦੇ
Trees are not merely shade;
they carry history in their memory.
Pooja Kalai is a researcher, educator, and designer whose practice sits at the intersection of material experimentation, sustainability, and design education. An alumna of NIFT and NID, she is currently pursuing a PhD in Design at IIT Guwahati.
Title of the work: What remains at the end of the warp? Medium: Textile
What tastes like excess becomes sustenance. Discarded yarn turns bitter labour into a careful, shared sweetness.From imbalance, a quiet nourishment emerges, here bitterness is patiently rewoven into care, asking us to pause, and begin again.
Pooja’s research responds to the accelerating crisis of material excess, in which rising population and industrial production place unsustainable pressure on natural resources, particularly within textile systems. In Tripura, the indigenous Tiprasa community’s weaving was historically sustained through jhum-cultivated cotton and practices that worked within material limits, reusing leftover yarns through motifs and secondary looms. Since the 1990s, the introduction of synthetic fibres has displaced these practices, generating new forms of waste and ecological imbalance. Focusing on the discarded yarn produced at the end of each warp, the project gathers and reworks this residue, drawing on indigenous techniques to foreground waste as a site of continuity, memory, and ecological potential rather than a symbol of loss.
