Climate story on our plates

The third edition of Sustaina India approaches the climate crisis through food systems and fruiting cycles

- SUGANDHA MUKHERJEE

THE THIRD EDITION of Sustaina India, titled Bitter Nectar, unfolds as a quiet but insistent meditation on climate change, one that refuses spectacle. Instead. it embeds itself in the most intimate of routines. Eating, cooking, carrying, and waiting.

Curated by Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, the Delhi-based artist duo whose practice spans painting, archiving, gaming, publishing, and long-term engagement with ecology and climate change, Sustaina India, on till February 14 at Bikaner House, New Delhi, approaches the climate crisis through food systems and fruiting cycles.

"Food is the base of what we do," says Tagra. "We connect with people or what we have thrice a day... it is basic, very much rooted into our day's routine." Food, for Tagra, is not an entry point chosen for symbolism but for necessity. "We also understand the food is very much related to the economy and the part and parcel that I have to eat to fill my stomach." Because food sits at the intersection of care, labour, culture, and survival, even subtle disruptions become deeply felt. "Taste changes and the dialect changes... each house has a particular kind of a cooking... as many religions and as many people and as many ways how we see it, it shifts you know."

The exhibition's title holds that unease—Bitter Nectar is deliberately contradictory. "Yes, it is. It doesn't sit well because we are actually stuck between the right and the wrong," Tagra says. The discomfort mirrors contemporary life, living with pollution, dependence on contested technologies, and growing uncertainty around what we consume. "What do you eat at this time when everything is shifting its taste or not?" he asks. "Why the nectar is bitter... what happens if the sweetness is changing its taste?" Dietary changes, lactose intolerance, altered crops, and unstable harvests are not hypothetical futures. "This is a time where the bitterness is actually coming from our heart."