These Indian artists want you to stop and ask questions at an ongoing art festival in Dubai

Departure, a guest project presented by Serendipity Arts Festival and Vadehra Art Gallery.

Also on display at Alserkal Art Week is Devadeep Gupta’s mixed-media installation, We Must Therefore Turn Our Attention Skywards, brought to the fair by Prameya Art Foundation, and comprising digital prints, photographs, a sculptural installation and a 4-channel soundscape. The work was developed as part of the Discover grant, which Prameya Art Foundation offers in collaboration with India Art Fair to support emerging practices that, in the words of curator Anushka Rajendran, transcend market-led approaches to art-making and forms of showing. “Artistic responses to ecology are especially powerful, because artists work at the intersection of several schools of thinking in a way that pure disciplines are unable to,” Rajendran explains. Gupta’s work emerges from such an intersection of colonial legacy, cultural heritage and ecological degradation. We Must Therefore Turn Our Attention Skywards addresses the human and more-than-human agents in the Dehing-Patkai rainforest in Assam, once mined for coal, now overrun by industrialists and cartels that continue the coloniser’s extractive legacy. “The project brings together archival research and anthropological research through various lines of inquiry,” says Rajendran. “There’s the critical take on industrial mining, the patterns of more-than-human life forms in the ecosystem, the life of the soil and the indigenous communities whose livelihoods have become entwined with economies that may be considered illicit.”