Collaborative survival: the body and the botanical
by Cleo Roberts-Komireddi
The dazzling and gregarious rich-yellow weaver birds, which Shiraz Bayjoo sensitively sketches in Village Weaver (2026), once made their way across the Indian Ocean from Southern Africa to the island of Mauritius. It was the late nineteenth century, and the species landed on an island long subjected to botanical, bodily and ecological interventions. At the hands of the country’s successive Dutch, French and British colonists, swathes of forests had been hacked down to make way for sugar and tea plantations, cultivated primarily by enslaved people; deer had been imported from Java along with bananas from China, among many other alien species. These introductions and extractions were transformative. Aside from the ramifications for the populace, the island’s ecology was dramatically reshaped, often with disastrous consequences that threw habitats into new cycles of growth and depletion. This was an age when, as Anna Tsing has noted, ‘progress […] unselfconsciously framed the study of landscapes’.1
The British predilection for advancement through the expansion of both territory and knowledge is intimated in Muhanned Cader’s soft charcoal landscape on newsprint. The snippet, shaped like a cloud, appears like an idyll or mirage. It depicts Sri Lanka, the teardrop-shaped island brutalised by colonial activity and years of civil war, now under mounting pressure from overdevelopment and intensive mineral mining. Specifically, Cader’s lush setting depicts Horton Plains National Park, a flat, verdant expanse ‘discovered’ by British colonial huntsmen and renamed after the nineteenth-century Governor of Ceylon, Robert Wilmot Horton, displacing its original name, Maha Eliya Thenna.
These plains were a popular resort where officials would roam, hunting elk and elephants. As the explorer Samuel White Baker relished, ‘It makes a man feel in reality one of the “lords of the creation” when he first stands upon this elevated plain […] and takes a survey of his hunting-
ground.’2 Such recreational jollies significantly decimated the wildlife population before the area was eventually protected by a preservation order prompted by the campaign of a colonial botanist. This historic catalogue of events and perspectives exemplifies the fluctuating terms of human relationships with the non-human world. While we exploit nature’s resources, we also conserve them. We are purveyors of the environment’s destruction and are simultaneously at its mercy, as Huma Bhabha’s post-apocalyptic, scorched figure may suggest.
Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah considers a similar form of conflict in his delicate watercolours, in which strangely familiar yet fantastical plants and anatomical parts fuse in biomorphic constellations. A heart chamber seems to blossom into a crop of mountains; veins and fingernails meld with the flesh of tropical fruits in Internal Echo, External Truth I (2025). As though in a stage of metamorphosis, the image advances the interconnection and interdependency between worlds. Despite the propensity to objectify the environment, these works seem to assert, ‘we are nature’.
Extending this perspective, Prajakta Potnis’ diptych 3:35 (2025) – comprising a drawing of a simple room, the floor of which appears on the precipice of eruption, and an isolated grater – draws parallels between the ransacking of land resources and, as she says, ‘the laboured breath of an overburdened body’.3 In particular, the work highlights female experience within the domestic realm, honing in on the kitchen – a broader area of investigation – as a site of demanding practices that often weaken, harm and exhaust the body. The idea of the home, less as a place of nurturing and security than a fragile, volatile space is also explored by Saad Qureshi. A spider is shown dangling from a dishevelled web that glistens in light rain. The individual silk threads sag and almost buckle in the weather, exposing what Qureshi describes as ‘the tension between protection and exposure, resilience and fragility’.
While some drawings are concerned with vulnerability, others treat image-making as a means of articulating the strength and immense capabilities of the body. For Manisha Parekh, who creates amoeba-like assemblages, the medium is both an act of feeling and a way of connecting with her own physicality. ‘I can feel my breath as I draw’, she explains. Prasanta Sahu accesses the corporeal memories of his father, the central figure in a cartographic image inscribed with place names and a mysterious, seemingly non-referential, numerical key. The word ‘Imaginary’ hangs in the top-left-hand corner, casting doubt on the orthodoxy of the whole and highlighting the inherent subjectivity of map-making.
Maha Ahmed’s fantastical folkloric scene is sharply executed in a way that recalls Persian and Mughal manuscripts as well as classical Japanese painting traditions. The creation of this scene, in which a dragon entangles itself around a rocky mountain top that appears abstracted from a broader terrain, is a salve for Ahmed: a moment of personal catharsis that reflects on the unresolved formation of identity. Similarly self-reflective is Nandini Bagla Chirimar’s The Humble Rice Grain (2026), which honours the autobiographical by dwelling on everyday spaces, items and possessions. In her minimalist image, blocks of thick black pigment, created using the Japanese Mokuhanga woodblock printing technique, contrast with a section of flaky gold leaf. Above them, a spread of rice grains resembles a swelling and seething sea.
This sense of animation echoes the way Simryn Gill articulates movement in her drawing of a small yet weighty construction tool, the plumb bob. The cone-shaped metal device with a fine tip is typically suspended by a string to create a perfect vertical line, much like a spirit level. Here, Gill subjects it to a portrait. Placed underneath the sheet of paper, it rolls and slips under the pencil’s pressure. The resulting impression, augmented by the loops and curls of Gill’s handwriting, could be mistaken for the anatomy of a reptilian species, recalling the artist’s Naga Doodles (2017), ink imprints taken from roadkill snakes found near her home in Malaysia.
The mundane for Gill becomes a route to understanding connections across people, time and place. The selection of drawings discussed here share similar motivations. Whether deploying the botanical or the bodily, they surface questions about the ways we might privilege a more empathetic approach to the many human and non-human, entities around us – to channel, as Tsing writes, ‘collaborative survival’.4
Dr Cleo Roberts-Komireddi is an art historian, broadcaster and commentator. She hosts the Art Worlds podcast and is currently writing a book on Indian Art for Yale University Press.
Endnotes
1 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p.5.
2 Samuel White Baker, The Rifle and Hound in Ceylon (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co, 1873), pp.158–59.
3 All artist quotations are taken from their supporting statements for the Drawing Biennial 2026.
4 Tsing, op. cit. (note 1), p.19.