Pooja Kishinani and Satakshi Gupta
An interview with visual artist Anuja Dasgupta, whose practice sits at the intersection of eco-art, ethnobotany and community. Using plant-based emulsions, cameraless photography, and repurposed wood, she creates art that refuses to represent the land, choosing to let it speak for itself. In this conversation, she shares how her practice evolved from photography to eco-art. She also reflects on colonial archives, the representational politics of botanical imagery and how her art attempts to counter the persistent misrepresentation of Ladakh as a barren, empty landscape.
Pooja: Hi Anuja. Thank you for joining us today. We’re delighted to be in conversation with you. To begin, please can you share a little bit about yourself and your artistic practice?
Anuja: I must establish that I am an accidental artist. I started off as a photographer during my undergraduate years when I was studying English Literature at Delhi University. There is such easy access to cultural spaces in Delhi, so I made good use of it. I entered the photography world because of people I met who were generous enough to give me opportunities I didn’t know existed. Once I started practising photography, I started looking closely into the idea of an image. But soon after, I withdrew from photography as I found it quite limiting for my creative expression.
Then I found solace in something called camera-less photography, which is essentially working with light. We think of photographs as something very sophisticated, made with a camera or a phone. Whereas if you look at the beginnings of photography, it’s nothing but light interacting with something that is sensitive to light.
Source: https://anujadasgupta.com/camera-obscura/
I spent some time working with the camera obscura (the pinhole camera) to get a sense of what exactly makes a photograph. I got a glimpse into the infinite wonders of light, and I wanted to experiment more. I found something called visual arts, thanks to a bunch of people who introduced me to this world, and that’s where I found meaning.
Somehow, I got through a Master’s of Visual Arts, which was a very difficult phase for me because I really had to learn the ropes. Everybody around me was a fine artist. In retrospect, I realise that because I was trained neither as an artist nor a photographer, I could play around with different media—something that traditionally trained artists often hesitate to do. That play is something that continues to inform my work even today.
My first project in Ladakh was in 2018, when I came across one of the first ever comprehensive published literature on Ladakh from 1854/56, if I remember correctly, written by Alexander Cunningham, a British commissioner who went on to become the first Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India. In a nutshell, I wanted to contest Cunningham’s deeply problematic, imperialist image of Ladakh, and after a series of workshops at Lamdon School in Leh and revisiting my personal archives of Ladakh from 2011, I made a series of artist books with multiple authors, questioning the fullness and accuracy claimed by historical archives.
Read more about the project here.
After the project, as I continued my art practice, I started teaching at the Naropa Fellowship in Leh. This was an extremely enriching experience as I learnt so much from my fellows which I couldn’t have learnt on my own as an artist.
Right after I moved to Ladakh, I also witnessed events that I would read about while I was in Delhi: cloudbursts and flash floods, loss of livelihoods, people moving and abandoning their homes. Seeing all of this firsthand threw me into an existential crisis. I thought — I can’t be documenting this world while being blind to my own medium. When you hold a phone or camera, when you go around documenting a place or people, you also leave certain footprints that actually speak against the very causes you are documenting. That unsettled me.
Meanwhile, I fell in love with the plants here, and I do have a green thumb which I got from my mother. I realised that the image of Ladakh that’s given to us is of this barren wasteland, but once you live here, you realise there’s abundance. It’s just that it all happens in such a short period, unlike elsewhere at least in our country. Of course, things grow here; how else would people live?
I started working with farmers and traditional medicine healers called Amchis, to understand the many lives of plants. Ethnobotany became my enthusiastic interest, I would say. It was a rabbit hole for me, and I’m still in it! A colleague of mine at Naropa, Stanba Gyaltsan, had built a startup in 2017 and had to shelve it. It was called “Ladakh Orchards”, and I always encouraged him to restart it. So after the Naropa Fellowship closed in 2022, we saw it as a blessing in disguise. In 2023, we co-founded a revamped Ladakh Orchards, a small social enterprise where we try to promote traditional agricultural practices of Ladakh.
What was exhibited this February at Bikaner House in Delhi was also born from Ladakh Orchards, with the central idea of apricots. Ladakh is the biggest producer of apricots in India— a statistic almost unknown in our own country. Even with my previous work with plants, you will see a lot of colour working against the perception of a barren Ladakh. I try to use that language because of the perception of Ladakh that I shared earlier—be it Cunningham’s colonial exploration to the very recent past—where the image of Ladakh is only partial. These things still sit with me, and whatever I do in my art practice is my attempt at approaching this issue.
Pooja: Thank you so much, Anuja. When I look at your art, I notice fluidity, playfulness and expansiveness. You’re not constrained by one medium. I’m in awe of how you weave together all of this in your practice.
How do you see your art and artistic process responding to the multiple crises we’re witnessing in India— climate chaos, ecological breakdown, and the political crisis in Ladakh, especially in relation to the demands for a sixth schedule?
Anuja: These are questions I still ask myself because I feel artists are given this huge responsibility of responding to the world, whereas people who actually run the world barely respond to the world’s crises.
As we speak, I’m working on a new project which is also community-oriented. I constantly ask myself what will the village (where this project is situated) get out of this project? What is the afterlife of the project? These are the kind of guiding questions that inform my process.
Specifically, when I work with plants, one thing that I try to do is shift the sense of botanical imagery that is familiar to us, such as intricate drawings and microscopic diagrams of a plant body. If you look at the history of botanical imagery, you will see it all started with colonisation. Then followed the need to document and transfer plants from one continent to another, etc. The surgical, anatomical drawings, illustrations, and diagrams of plants completely take away the plant’s agency. Right now, thankfully, we live in a time where people are questioning the Linnaean taxonomy that we are taught, which is very problematic at its core because you bring all the problems that humans have created to the plant world.
If you look at my work on plants, you will never actually see a plant. The project, ‘Elemental Whispers’ started it all, thanks to an award from the Prince Claus Fund, which gave me the means to start working on it. For this, I make photosensitive emulsions from plants for camera-less photographs. The project started off with addressing Ladakh’s rich flora, to now being a compendium of Ladakh’s plants that also face threats against their survival.
If you’ve ever put any flowers or twigs in a diary, you would always find some sort of an imprint. So, I could have taken this project that way too, which is, leaving a leaf or a branch of that plant in that plant’s emulsion to make a camera-less image. But then I would get into the representational politics of the plant. What does it look like? How beautiful is the body of the plant? I simply did not want to do that.
This decision to not represent the plants as objects of my study also stems from my own position as someone who is not from Ladakh. I’ve grown up in several places across the country, and this nomadic upbringing doesn’t really give me a sense of home. I’m very conscious that this land that makes my work is not where I was born. I do not have the authority to talk about the land as if it were mine, even though, you know, after a point of time when you spend time in close-knit communities, people do accept you to the extent that they call you their own, which I’m very grateful for. But I’m still aware of my positionality.
What I want to do is talk about the plant’s being. I only work with plant emulsions when the flowers/fruits are in season. Take the wild Syah rose, for instance, which blossoms only for a few weeks in summer. I usually go towards the end of summer to forage, because by that time, there are plenty of petals blanketing the ground. I make the emulsion at the same site, and I expose it right there. I coat watercolour sheets with plant emulsions, anchor them with some stones, and I just leave them by the river—over days, weeks, whatever the exposure time the emulsion requires. I do not add artificial chemicals to catalyse the exposure so it’s as safe as possible to be left in the open. When I come back to the sheet, I see that the colours have changed, there are some marks. The river changes its flow, and brings with it leaves, moss, twigs. I have seen cows, horses, dogs, birds, insects, land on my sheets. I’ve also had them eaten by cows; it’s their food after all. After weeks of hard work, I have lost my art to nature as well. My sheets have also flown away with the river. If the sheet is damaged, I’ve seen birds pick it up and take it to their nests. This project has taught me to embrace nature’s rhythms in countless ways. It’s a very seasonal work; it’s demanding, but also rewarding.
See the entire series here.
How does my art respond to the world? I feel what I’m trying to do is share with the world what I see instead of dictating what I think is supposed to happen to the world. I feel that this one baby step is also a big leap as a creative practitioner, because if I’m able to translate ten per cent of what I feel about the world, through an exhibition, through one web link, I’ll feel that something has been done.
In the kind of exhibition setups, like the one that Satakshi saw in Bikaner House which was completely out of my comfort zone. I have never really worked with wood before. I’ve worked with all parts of a plant but the wood because it was the most intimidating for me.
At one of the farms at Ladakh Orchards, there were poplar logs kept for over two years, which would have been thrown into the firewood last winter. I wanted to give the poplar wood an afterlife, and that’s how this work and the gameplay took form. For exhibitions like this one, I feel there is a bigger responsibility. Since I’m under the umbrella of something called Sustaina, there will be more people asking questions. This work was specially done for this exhibition which is why it’s way far from my usual language and comfort zone. Having exhibited in Delhi before, people hold preconceived notions about Ladakh and it’s a lot of fun to break those notions. That’s the kind of experience I wanted under Sustaina as well.
What I did there was make an interactive game. There is the construct of an artwork being this untouchable, passive piece of work. Most of my work is fairly interactive, but I really wanted people to play with this one. Also, the curators at Sustaina, Thukral and Tagra, are experts in game design, so I knew that if I got this kind of mentorship, I better make one game out of it. The final exhibition was very rewarding for me because I did not expect such a level of public interaction.
When we had a reflection call with the Sustaina team, somebody said that the kids who came to the exhibition loved the game, and if they ever hear about Ladakh, they won’t talk only about the mountains—they’ll think of apricots first. That has really stayed with me because I feel I have honestly exceeded my own expectations. The response was overwhelming.
In a nutshell, it’s really about sharing the world as I see it. And I feel responses then come organically. I also feel that when art becomes too didactic, it becomes limiting, and sometimes it takes the wrong turn. I do believe I still have a long way to go!
Satakshi: Thank you for sharing that, Anuja. When I think of Ladakh, I’m also going to think of your gameplay installation at the exhibition.
I was going through all your artwork. You did something on the river called How Does A River Breathe?, and another project called (Extra)terrestrial, which was the one that I liked the most, because it merged the concept of something considered so tiny and so small such as the plant, to the entire cosmos and to bigger questions around how creation began.
As you said, your art utilises all materials of the plant. I noticed you also used sand in one of your projects. A lot of artwork I come across is abstract and idea-based instead of being tethered to something real, like the Earth itself. Why is it important for you to anchor your art to the physical elements of the Earth?
Anuja: When I started off with this rhythm of my work, I didn’t know I was going to become an environmental artist or an eco-artist. Using earth materials rather naturally to me. Tying back to what I shared earlier, I wish to share what I see and what I feel. For me, my medium and the message are essentially the same. I will not give you a painting of a flower to think about the flower. I would rather give you the flower. That’s how I am wired.
After I started exhibiting these works, I realised that I must keep doing this also because people have forgotten how to interact with the earth. A lot of these realisations have come through my work at Ladakh Orchards, because we are also into agro-tourism. We take people to century-old farms and orchards in Ladakh’s Sham Valley, which is the region’s agriculture and horticulture belt. The more I interact with people, the more I realise the gap between nature and civilisation now.
Read more about the project here.
Satakshi: How do you choose which plants to work with, or how do you decide which artwork can go onto become a game?
Anuja: In terms of which plants to choose, it feels like there’s a whole world out there! My work is dictated by the seasons. I look for what’s already there. Since you mentioned the other work, How does River Breathe was done over a residency in Switzerland, and there you’ll also see the Himalayan influence in the final form of the work. I didn’t hunt for special plants that exist there. I used whatever was by the river next to our residence.
(Extra)terrestrial happened during another residency in South Africa, which has the smallest yet richest of all six floral kingdoms. I happened to be around the Cape Floristic Region, where you have a different biome of plants, broadly termed “fynbos”, which you can think of like phoenix plants. These plants are completely charred in the region’s fires and then they come back to life. In a way, this is similar to how I see plants in Ladakh being blanketed in snow, becoming grey and dead in winter and resuscitating in spring. What I saw in South Africa was how fire is a life-giver; it is necessary for the plant to survive. I was looking into the mechanisms that the plant uses to survive, like their seed dispersal, the kind of pockets that they have, their waxy leaves which absorb moisture for a very long time, these bulbs that they have under the soil, etc.
To give you an example, what happens after the fire is that these pockets of seeds are hit, and the seeds are then dispersed. So if there’s no fire, there’s no plant. When I had arrived for my residency, I saw charred lands, and after two weeks everything was green! That’s how I chose those plants, because they were just right there for me, and the same happens in Ladakh again and again.
Coming to your second question about games. Well, last year was particularly very difficult for Ladakh. There is some erratic snowfall in spring once in a while in Ladakh, but what happened in 2025 was incessant snowfall for almost 48 hours. So the apricot flower that had blossomed had no time to come back to its microclimate, as it got completely blanketed in snow. When it snows on and off and the sun comes out, at least the snow evaporates after a point of time. But this snow was so bad that it directly affected the season’s yield.
This happened in April. Then in August, there was a 900%+ increase in rainfall. The apricot production was affected from many angles last year. For Sustaina, the exhibition was planned for early 2026, so I felt a responsibility to talk about this because we had a very tough time at Ladakh Orchards as well. Given the issues of Ladakh’s identity and the recent violence, I strongly felt that I have to talk about the land.
Since you [Satakshi] did interact with the game, what you saw in that entire setup is my daily life, actually. It’s all four seasons of Ladakh. You move from summer to spring to fall to winter in the game, and at the center of the game, there’s the traditional Ladakhi home, with two kitchens — the upper summer kitchen and the lower winter kitchen. Once you spend some more time with the game, you realise that you’re actually moving with time over the gameplay, and how in the summer kitchen, there are apricots everywhere but in the winter kitchen, the apricot tacitly comes back and sits in one of the bowls. I think of the apricot as a symbol of life in Ladakh, also as my work at Ladakh Orchards is based in the Sham Valley, where you get the best apricots! But given the context of 2025 and the immediate responsibility that I felt, talking about not just the land through this very faraway symbol of an apricot, but also people, because when you’re making the game, you’re actually putting together blocks of community agriculture activities. You’re putting together farmers plucking something from somewhere, sowing, ploughing the land, etc.
The whole point of the game was also to use poplar wood, which is very soft. But it’s also not the kind of wood that woodworkers would use because it’s not functionally durable. It bends easily, and I love that. So the disadvantage of the wood became my advantage. What happened with the game was that with more play, the wood kept chafing, meaning that these square blocks weren’t perfect squares after a point of time, and there were increasing gaps between blocks. So the more the puzzle was made, the more it was damaged. I wanted this sense of discomfort in the play to directly address the rapid seasonal changes in Ladakh which directly affect the life of the apricot, and the people that nurture it.
I’m also conscious that this happened in Delhi, and the city’s collective footprint affects the faraway land that is Ladakh. But how do I talk about it? I don’t want to be like, Oh, you’ve turned on an AC, and that’s why a glacier is melting. So I thought, let’s give discomfort some medium within the work, and that’s what happened with the wood compromising the structure of the game.
Pooja: Thank you so much Anuja for offering a glimpse of your work, vision, and process. It truly feels like your art is an active collaboration with the materials you work with. Your art invites people to reflect and engage with bigger questions in a playful way. We are grateful that you could make time to share your artistic practice with us.
Anuja Dasgupta is a visual artist, educator, and agri-preneur based in Ladakh, India. In an image-driven world, she situates her practice in the fundamental processes of image-making. Her work emerges from the vantage point of Ladakh, located in the remote roof of the Indian Himalayan range. She seeks to develop new perspectives on the climate crisis by working with image-making techniques that produce visual notes of nature’s often unspoken rhythms—crafting experiences that evoke the profound, and now endangered, interconnectedness of life.
Pooja Kishinani is editor and curator of Radical Ecological Democracy (RED) web journal. She is a member of Kalpavriksh and programme coordinator at The Emergence Network (ten).
Satakshi Gupta is an intern with Kalpavriksh and has been supporting the Radical Ecological Democracy (RED) web journal.