Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show (8)

How We Breath By Rashmimala

How We Breath By Rashmimala

July 11, 2025 – August 12, 2025

Artworks in Exhibition

“We must aspire, my friend,” Goethe continues, “to think like a plant.” By this he does not mean they need to purify air through the action of the sun . . . . “Rather we learn from plants a way of living and thinking . . . With my gentian [plant] it struck me how, even in its apparent stillness, it was a dynamically sensitive being, forming and changing itself through dialogue with whatever conditions it met in the world . . . air, moisture, light . . .”

Everything the Light Touches, Janice Pariat

In this body of work, Rashmimala’s engagement with plants shifts from a critique of the representational strategies of coloniality to an active exploration of plants in the contemporary moment. Consisting of several groupings of diverse plants, the exhibition simultaneously registers the ubiquitous presence of plants in urban life and the anonymity of some of these. Ruderals — plants that grow on waste ground or among rubbish — that have been portrayed here grow everywhere, but are noticed little. These are not plants found in carefully landscaped gardens, but are those pushing out of cracks in pavements.

Focusing on Delhi, but also underlining the capital’s connections with other places, these works offer a new understanding of the backyard. Ranging from the literal — memories of her own backyard in Assam — to the metaphorical — the urban spaces as the backyard to our lives in concrete, they invite us to look more carefully at the plants that surround us. The plants here straddle the specific and the general, at once tied to a precise geo-coordinate where the plant was collected as well the plant’s representative status in an ecology of the city. The artworks on view here depict plants with a severe realism drawn from scientific botanical illustration and simultaneously with an ethereal, almost dream-like quality that comes from the tenderness with which Rashmimala treats her subject, the labour-intensive processes she works with.

Side by side, playing with scale, shape, grouping, and juxtaposition in this body of work, Rashmimala challenges the way we look at plants, forces us to imagine the diverse ways plants intersect in our lives. Her works convince us to revisit terms like invasive, migration, native and non-native, to persuade us to think about the possibilities of reconsidering habitual frameworks through which we look at the plant, and our own, lives.

— Deeptha Achar

Artists

Installation Shots

Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show (1)
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show (1)
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show
  • Installation shoot by Rashmimala Show (8)

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