Public Lecture: The Land Sings Back

The exhibition The Land Sings Back is curated by Natasha Ginwala, Artistic Director of Colomboscope, and reimagines our relationship to our breathing planet through the work of thirteen artists with ancestries across South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. 

On the occasion of the exhibition's opening, we welcome Anna Arabindan-Kesson for her public lecture The Land Sings Back: Botanical Visions, Fugitive Assemblages and an Art for the Afterlife.

While we live in the afterlives of colonial systems of extraction, the artworks included in this exhibition assemble alternative visions of reciprocity. These affiliations are drawn in the fugitive journeys of people and plants, they are formed in new repositories of care, grown from structures of protection, plotted from lines of displacement and shaped by alternative histories of creation and regeneration. This talk explores the intellectual genealogies this exhibition calls up, tracing how the artists gathered here guide us towards the histories we need now, to nurture the entanglements that will sustain our future. 

The lecture is generously supported and jointly hosted by The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, UCL’s Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World, Drawing Room, and Colomboscope. 

Lead Image (left): Shiraz Bayjoo, Botanical Shrines, 2024. Acrylic and resin on wood, botanical specimens, Mahogany wood, Giant African snail shells, glass, gold chain, metal coins, faux 
pearls, sea shells, ‘Coral island’ book, doily, volcanic rocks. Dimensions variable. Courtesy 421 Arts Campus, Dubai and the artist. Photo: Ismail Noor 
Lead image (right): Charmaine Watkiss, The warrior exercises the right to dissent, 2025. Coffee, water soluble graphite, pencil, coloured pencil, watercolour and shell gold on paper. 76 x 56 cm (framed 88 x 66cm). Courtesy the artist