The Land Sings Back is a deeply resonant exhibition that reimagines how we inhabit and listen to the living world. Presented by Colomboscope, Sri Lanka, in collaboration with Drawing Room, London, the exhibition runs from 25 September to 14 December 2025 at Drawing Room’s South London space, and brings together voices rooted in South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.
Curated by Natasha Ginwala, Artistic Director of Colomboscope and one of Frieze’s Five Curators to Watch in 2025, the exhibition grows out of threads initiated at Way of the Forest—Colomboscope 2023–24’s interdisciplinary exploration of ecology, interspecies justice, and cultural inheritances. In the exhibition, those threads become interwoven with broader diasporic and intergenerational perspectives, situating drawing as a living agent in storytelling, social history, Indigenous knowledge, and ecofeminist thought.
Ecologies of Entanglement
The exhibition foregrounds the entanglements between the human, vegetal, and animal realms, inviting audiences to dwell in zones where boundary lines dissolve. The works by thirteen participating artists, Lado Bai, Shiraz Bayjoo, Lavkant Chaudhary, Jasmine Nilani Joseph, Manjot Kaur, Otobong Nkanga, Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah, Joydeb Roaja, Anupam Roy, Anushka Rustomji, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Arulraj Ulaganathan and Charmaine Watkiss channel botanical memory, ancestral imagination, and insurgent ways of knowing. What emerges is a vision of land as an animate interlocutor—one that bears witness, remembers, and resists.
