The Land Sings Back
25 Sep-14 Dec 2025
PV 24 Sep 2025, 6-8pm

The Land Sings Back reimagines our relationship to our breathing planet through the work of thirteen artists with ancestries across South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Engaging with these cultural vocabularies through a lens of environmental justice, the exhibition approaches drawing as an active agent of social history, indigenous knowledge and ecofeminist philosophy, rather than as a tool of illustration, classification and conquest. Exposing entanglements between the human, vegetal and animal, the works explore how botanical consciousness can reshape relationships among multitudinous life-forms, making room for regeneration amidst indebtedness, infrastructural collapse and neocolonial inheritance. The Land Sings Back encourages a connection with ancestral wisdom and ecosophy through reciprocal rather than extractive relationships with land during these times of war and accelerated toxicity.
The exhibition and its associated public programme engage with a range of pressing questions with research-led approaches around multispecies ecologies, coloniality and environmental justice. It brings attention to networked extractive systems that spread toxicity and polarisation, sparking climate emergencies and mass displacements. Growing from some of the artworks that were initiated at Way of the Forest, Colomboscope 2023-24 – an interdisciplinary arts festival in Colombo, Sri Lanka – it builds new and broader alliances with creative practitioners in the UK and African heritage practitioners. The recent and newly produced works engage site-led recordings, archival research, communal learning and expanded forms of drawing that incorporate sound work, zines, ceramics, and posters.
The exhibition is curated by Natasha Ginwala, Artistic Director of Colomboscope, co-curator of Sharjah Biennial 16 and one of Frieze’s Five Curators to Watch in 2025. It is produced as a collaboration between Colomboscope, Sri Lanka and Drawing Room, London, UK.
The Land Sings Back press release
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