Can a Cloud Speak of Justice in India, and How? De-Universalising the Representation of Climate Change

This paper focuses on art projects that engage with climate change in India and offers a granular analysis of its representation. The analysis is informed by scholarly interventions on the nexus between art and the environment and the need of a more-than-human geography approach. In Can Art History be Made Global? Meditations from the Periphery (2023), art historian Monica Juneja asks us to conceive afresh the worlds of human creativity we study as immersed within multispecies and multi-material ecosystems that are also profoundly shaped by climate change. She invites us to rethink transcultural critique whereby ‘its understanding of culture no longer rests on a nature-culture divide’ (2023: 282). In turn, a non binary understanding of nature-culture within the visual arts today compels us to reflect on how art works addressing climate change have represented the ‘livingness of the world’, that is what produces a shift in ‘the register of materiality from the indifferent stuff of a world ‘out there’ [...], to the intimate fabric of corporeality that includes and redistributes the ‘in here’ of human being’, to make room for ‘‘more-than-human’ approaches to this world’ – as geographer Sarah Whatmore (2006: 602) has argued. Building on these interventions and with climate change in view, this paper argues that representations of such change cannot be assumed to be one and the same globally because of both local ontologies and the different ways in which the climate crisis manifests itself across world locations. The paper foregrounds this diversity and the ways in which art works in India might speak to several audiences and contribute towards climate justice.