Contribution to “Climate, Habitat, Environments” – Ute Meta Bauer (ed), NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore, and The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England, 2022.
Short summary: Artists and writers go beyond disciplinary boundaries and linear histories to address the fight for environmental justice, uniting the Asia-Pacific vantage point with international discourse.

This volume outlines the specific conditions and responses to climate change in India. It discusses various aspects of the planetary crisis that have acquired widespread global urgency: global warming induced by anthropogenic emissions, largely owing to the fossil fuel-based economic growth model; severe environmental decline; and the catastrophic consequences that threaten the very foundations of modern life, which has been based on using nature as a ‘resource’ instead of as an ecosystem in which human life exists.

International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, and their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown?

Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice-based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change.

This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.

Introducing Marg’s first dedicated issue to art and ecology, the Associate Editor places the current magazine in the context of the severe climate crisis affecting earth and its human and more-than-human inhabitants. She provides the framework within which the essays in this volume will unpack and critically assess the term “Anthropocene” and provide counter-narratives from the Global South that challenge the assumptions and domination of the Global North. These include perspectives on gender, class, caste, labour, ritual and mythology. The larger aim is to look at aesthetic objects beyond the limited circuits of the commercial art world and get them to engage with environmental justice and social justice movements.

Art and Ecology
Guest editor: Ravi Agarwal
MARG – A Magazine of the Arts
March 20, 2020

Guest edited by Ravi Agarwal – Resident editor: Omita Goyal. With a galaxy of wonderful contributors from across various spectrums.

Edited by Ravi Agarwal, Florian Matzner and Helmut Schippert
Publisher: Speaking Tiger

2 person show Francois Daireaux and Ravi Agarwal – Gallery Espace, Bonjour India, France in India, December 2017

Edingburgh Art Festival, 2018. Lithographs, Toyota Etchings, Photographs, Videos, Found Object

Wexler, P. (Ed.), van der Kolk, J. (Ed.), Mohapatra, A. (Ed.), Agarwal, R. (Ed.). (2012). Chemicals, Environment, Health. Boca Raton: CRC Press

Jan Breman, Arvind N. Das. Photographs Ravi Agarwal

Catalogue in PDF for “Flux: Dystopia, Utopia, Heterotopia.” Gallery Espace, 2011

Artist’s Diary and 2 Catalogues relating to this body of work

Dairy of the ecological underpinnings of traditional marigold growing on the riverbanks in Delhi

The story of the near extinction of the South Asian Vulture

Diary of a social and political ecology of the river Yamuna in New Delhi