New Delhi, 31 August 2026: The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) announces Inheritors of Earth, opening to the public at KNMA, New Delhi, on 9 September 2026. Moving away from minimalistic expressions of human emotions, the exhibition, curated by Premjish Achari, Senior Curator, KNMA, invites us to consider the world through a vegetal lens, exploring plant life as protagonists in a shared world: presenting them as agents beyond human perspectives of function, aesthetics, or ecological concern. 

Echoing Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s Bhumiyude Avakashikal (1977), which imagines humans, flora and fauna as equal co-custodians of the planet, the exhibition considers plant life not as a passive backdrop to human experience, but as a parallel, entangled world with its own rhythms, histories and forms of resilience. It opens possibilities for unlearning the transactional ways in which we usually approach plants, encouraging us instead to dwell with their worlds, observe their temporalities and allow their rhythms to enter the texture of artistic practice. 

Bringing together paintings, photographs, drawings, videos and installations, the exhibition traces themes of growth and decay, rootedness and migration, memory and ecological change. The artists move beyond simply representing plants to develop what the exhibition describes as a phytosensitive approach, one that brings a patient and meditative sensibility to looking, attending to plant temporalities, displaced organic matter and the histories carried through botanical migrations. Together, these practices invite us to look with plants rather than merely at them, reconfiguring our imagination towards coexistence, humility and a renewed sense of shared inheritance.

Premjish Achari, Senior Curator, KNMA said, “This exhibition places plant life at the centre of its inquiry, moving beyond conventional representations of plants as passive elements of the landscape. Inheritors of Earth brings together artworks that engage with mangroves, forests, plantation crops, and urban trees as living entities shaped by histories of labour, caste, ecology, and care. The exhibition invites us to reconsider our relationship with the vegetal world and to recognise plants as co-inheritors of the earth, with histories and forms of agency that exist alongside our own.” 

The exhibition also brings together contributions that extend its immersive and interdisciplinary character, including poetry and audio narration by Manuel Mata, a seating installation by Sweety Chakma, soundscape design by Ben Goldfarb, booklet design by Aranya Sengupta, and a reading room with a special selection of works from Shared Ecologies’ archive.

Notes to editor 

About Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) 

Founded in 2010, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) is India’s leading private museum of modern and contemporary art from South Asia. A non-commercial, not-for-profit institution supported by the Shiv Nadar Foundation, KNMA presents exhibitions, commissions, performances, and public programmes that connect visual and performing arts with broad audiences. Through its wide-ranging learning and community initiatives, KNMA works to expand access to the arts and foster deeper engagement with modern and contemporary practices. KNMA is currently under construction on a new purpose-built campus in New Delhi that will significantly expand its exhibition, performance, and learning capacities. Conceived as an interdisciplinary cultural center, the new building will enable more ambitious artistic production, cross-disciplinary collaboration,and public programming, strengthening the museum’s role as a leading cultural platform in India and internationally. 

www.knma.org