A three-year research and pedagogical initiative based at the South Asia Art Initiative, UC Berkeley.
In response to environmental precarity, resurgent nationalisms, and intensified global interdependence, Language of Nature, Language of Culture: Towards a Decolonial Art History critically examines the relationship between nature and culture as one of the central problems facing the humanities today. India serves as the project’s primary site of inquiry. Rather than treating the nation-state as a self-evident unit of analysis, however, the project foregrounds longue durée histories of circulation, ecological entanglement, and multi-sited exchange that have connected the subcontinent to wider worlds across the Indian Ocean, Eurasia, Africa, and the Transpacific. In doing so, it advances a connected art history that exposes the limits of claims to civilizational enclosure by demonstrating how artistic, intellectual, and ecological formations have long been co-produced through movements, crossings, and material exchanges that exceed territorial closure. The project’s animating hypothesis is that this orientation can generate conceptual and methodological tools capable of addressing the intertwined crises of environmental precarity and ethnonationalist politics.
Nature and culture are not opposed domains but co-produced histories of matter, mobility, imagination, and power.
Led by Professors Sugata Ray and Atreyee Gupta, the project is based at the South Asia Art Initiative (SAAI), housed within the Institute for South Asia Studies (ISAS) at the University of California, Berkeley. It is supported by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative.
The project unfolds through two site-based laboratories in Kolkata (March 21–27, 2027) and Delhi (March 26–April 1, 2028), followed by a concluding convening at Berkeley in 2029. The laboratories are being organized in partnership with Experimenter gallery in Kolkata and Delhi Art Gallery (DAG) in Delhi.
The laboratories will convene a global cohort of early-career scholars and practitioners for intensive seminars in these two historically layered megacities, where ecological processes and cultural production remain deeply interconnected. Through experiential learning, field-based workshops with leading scholars and artists, archival encounters, and collaborative research, participants will develop a rigorous, portable lexicon for studying artistic and visual histories. Built through collective inquiry, this lexicon will link material, environmental, and cultural analyses to the intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical demands of the present.
The concluding gathering at Berkeley will synthesize the cohort’s inquiries through a series of public engagements to launch critical pedagogical tools for collective inquiry.
Across all three years, SAAI will host art historians, critical and cultural theorists, and scholars of visual culture for public talks in Kolkata, Delhi, and Berkeley. These talks will anchor the program’s interdisciplinary engagement with climate, decolonization, and planetary thought while contributing to a publicly accessible, evolving archive of lectures and conversations on the project website.
