From photographing the Yamuna to documenting industrial-waste ecologies and riverine movements, artist and environmental activist Ravi Agarwal’s artistic practice has consistently unsettled the usual ways of seeing, acknowledging how the world is not only seen by us but is also seeing us.In his ongoing exhibition at Gallery Espace in Delhi titled “Historia Denaturalis”, he challenges “the epistemology of human interactions with other-than-human realms.” In this email interview, he reflects on the unresolved questions that return from earlier works, traces the shifting material and metaphysical meanings of water in his practice, and interrogates natural history museums as sites of both fascination and violence. Ravi Agrawal’s artwork (Photo Credit: Gallery Espace)The exhibition “Historia Denaturalis” is presented as a continuation of the questions you first posed in “Immersion. Emergence” (2006). What felt unresolved in those earlier engagements that brought you back here?When I see and react to ‘nature,’ it is from a connection. It defines who I am in many ways. A tree is of course, an object, a river is a water body, an animal a species, but it is also an evocation of memory and emotion and rooted to my moorings. I remember the touch of the hair on the back of the camel I first rode in my teens at my grandfather’s haveli in Rajasthan. I called this a ‘personal ecology’ in “Immersion. Emergence”. On the other hand, the nature discourse has been objectified, classified and made impersonal and abstract. I wish to explore and critique the reasons, historical as well as pedagogical, why this has happened. I think the sustainability challenge starts with each one of us. Nature and culture are intertwined. Nature makes us, as we make it. Art is my language. Ravi Agrawal’s artwork (Photo Credit: Gallery Espace)Water has remained central to your practice, from the Yamuna to river dolphins and melting glaciers. Has your relationship to water changed over time? If you could also comment on how the world around it has changed.Water is central to everything we do. It shapes life, livelihoods, mythology and culture. It is also mystical, meditative, mysterious and timeless. We have reduced this to a mere molecule in our thinking or a utility. I have worked on rivers, with fishers, and now with dolphins and glaciers since these connections and flows draw me into them. I increasingly feel that their depths hide something deeply cosmic. I am interested in drawing out its local cultural roots, for example how did the indigenous Mapuche community in Patagonia see glaciers, or how the fishers know the sea.Today, the materiality of water has been transformed into built infrastructure to serve only us. River basins are being dammed, interlinked, while more-than-human beings are being eliminated. Pollution is rampant and what was once sacred and a global common is now becoming privatised and profane.Story continues below this ad Ravi Agrawal’s artwork (Photo Credit: Gallery Espace)In your earlier works, the encounter with ecology was often intimate and local. In this exhibition, it feels more archival and planetary. If you could talk about this shift. In this exhibition, the intimate is through my moving, performing body in many of the works. I don’t think of this exhibition as a shift, but more of a back and forth, an artistic struggle. Some of the questions I am trying to raise seem so big and structural to me that I felt the need to approach them in this way in some of these works. However, to me the connections remain personal, but also that the personal is never separated from the larger planetary.Natural history museums recur in this exhibition as sites of both fascination and violence. When did you begin to see these institutions not just as repositories of knowledge, but as instruments that shaped how we perceive nature? I recurringly visited natural history museums over the years wherever I went. They are fascinating, riveting and a theatre of the absurd. While there are violent extinctions everywhere, and habitats are destroyed, here animals are preserved as living but dead. Historically, they denote the long colonisation of flora and fauna since the 15th century and show many exotic animals which cannot be found in the West. How does one explain a Royal Bengal Tiger in the Bergen museum in cold Norway? Or in the Berlin museum, I saw a ‘family’ of lions, and it is doubtful if lions are a ‘family’ in any human sense. The fantastic Berne museum has a large collection donated by the Swiss hunter Bernhard von Wattenwyl and his daughter Vivenne from Africa. Almost in no museum are native collectors, scientists, taxidermists, or cultural names even mentioned. In the Sydney Museum, as in some others, one can still see exhibits of indigenous peoples. While western museums reportedly have over three billion specimens on display or in storage, in India, the few such museums have them in the few hundreds, showing their large-scale extraction. What is shown where, in what way, and in which context shapes the way in which we understand the natural world; these museums, however, create a colonial fiction.Story continues below this ad Ravi Agrawal’s artwork (Photo Credit: Gallery Espace)Also Read | Charpai, couture and comics: What the Macrons saw in DelhiYour curatorial work — most recently the Bergen Assembly 2025 in Norway — also foreground ideas of entanglement, listening and shared ecologies. How does that curatorial experience feed back into your own artistic practice?I think today we need to think in terms of multipolar worlds through co-existence, not merely “inclusion.” It implies a new modernity, based on mutual acceptance and shared values. It also implies conversations between cultures, knowledge systems and ways of life, which leads to difficulties and sometimes impossibilities of creating common grounds since they reflect such different human experiences and world-making. My approach to the Bergen Assembly was rooted in this understanding, proposed as an event of encounters, and where new possibilities could appear during the Assembly. These encounters or conversations were between art and science, indigenous and modern ideas of land, agrarian systems and social hierarchies and histories. Many everyday voices have been oppressed and marginalised, yet have been very present amongst us all – feminist, dalit, queer, rural women, who need to be heard. I believe shifting positions of power by embracing diversity marks the beginning of empathy and learning with an altered position of humility and love.This rich diversity of cultures and lives — both human and more than human — points us towards a Planetarity [DC1], which, in Gayatri Spivak’s ideas, points towards being in relationship to the Earth, while embracing its otherness and difference. I wished to propose ways to be together, peacefully and productively, to point towards new futures, as a break from past trajectories. These ideas have informed my artistic practice for a very long time. Ravi Agrawal’s artwork (Photo Credit: Gallery Espace)Several works in this exhibition ask us to imagine how animals, rivers or glaciers might perceive us. If you could talk about the need to develop another gaze? Story continues below this adJohn Berger, in his seminal text “What look at animals”, writes how we have created a mutual “abyss of non-comprehension” with them — a lack of a common language. However, while we observe, we are observed back. We forget that there are active observers on both sides. We have created a hierarchy of “seeing,” enabling our objectification and commodification of the natural world. That world has been marginalised by us, as sites of exploration or for displays in zoos or museums. This is the ongoing colonisation of nature and it is self-destructive, reflected in the ‘gaze.’ We are all equally vulnerable and transitory.