The Land Sings Back: Botanical Visions, Fugitive Assemblages and an Art for the Afterlife

A public lecture by Anna Arabindan-Kesson at the Paul Mellon Centre, celebrating the launch of The Land Sings Back, an exhibition curated by Natasha Ginwala (Colomboscope) and held at Drawing Room, London, from 25 September to 15 December 2025.

While we live in the afterlives of colonial systems of extraction, the artworks included in this exhibition assemble alternative visions of reciprocity. These affiliations are drawn in the fugitive journeys of people and plants, they are formed in new repositories of care, grown from structures of protection, plotted from lines of displacement and shaped by alternative histories of creation and regeneration. The talk explores the intellectual genealogies this exhibition calls up, tracing how the artists gathered here guide us towards the histories we need now, to nurture the entanglements that will sustain our future.

The lecture is generously supported and jointly hosted by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; UCL’s Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World; Drawing Room; and Colomboscope.