Language of Nature, Language of Culture: Toward a Decolonial Art History

The South Asia Art Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, invites applications from early career scholars, advanced PhD candidates, curators, artists, and other creative practitioners for Language of Nature, Language of Culture: Toward a Decolonial Art History, a three-year international traveling seminar and research laboratory supported by the Getty's Connecting Art Histories initiative. Directed by UC Berkeley art historians Sugata Ray and Atreyee Gupta, the project convenes participants in Kolkata, Delhi, and Berkeley to reconsider relations between artistic production and the natural environment over the longue durée.

What becomes of the aesthetic object when rivers are understood as goddesses or as abodes of nāgas and other spirits, forests as sites of ancestral presence, and air as prāṇa, the vital breath suturing life to the cosmos? Across South and Southeast Asia, diverse intellectual, artistic, and religious traditions have long articulated relations between human and more-than-human worlds that cannot be adequately understood through the nature-culture binary of modern Western thought.

If colonial regimes of survey, extraction, and classification reorganized these relations, recasting rivers as hydraulic systems, converting forests into resources, displacing Indigenous communities, and categorizing animated things as ethnographic specimens, colonial museums and Western European art history consolidated these transformations, subsuming culturally situated things—variously designated as benda, vastu, chīz, vật, and bagay—under the ostensibly universal category of the art object. At stake were the ecological, social, and cosmological relations that such acts of classification rendered illegible. Political independence did not, in itself, dismantle these regimes of knowledge and governance; postcolonial states, in New Delhi as in Jakarta, in Colombo as in Hanoi, retained the colonial survey, census, and map as instruments of administration. The promise of political emancipation remained entangled with the dam, the factory, the plantation, and the mine.

Conceived amid the environmental crises of the present, Language of Nature, Language of Culture examines how anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial aesthetic and intellectual practices have negotiated extraction, toxicity, and displacement and participated in struggles for environmental justice. Rather than positing an ecologically integrated past against a disenchanted modernity, the project asks what counts as a material, an environment, or an aesthetic encounter when rivers, forests, animals, and atmospheric forces participate in the production of form and meaning. To understand natural forces as constitutive of art and its histories is to reconsider inherited assumptions about authorship, objecthood, and materiality. The project’s decolonial ambitions thus extend to the conceptual lexicon through which art becomes knowable and planetary worlds inhabitable.

The project comprises three laboratories: a Deltaic Research Laboratory in Kolkata (2027), in partnership with Experimenter; an Elemental Urbanisms Research Laboratory in Delhi (2028), in partnership with DAG; and a Diasporic Ecologies Research Laboratory at the South Asia Art Initiative (2029). Each laboratory brings together curators, artists, and scholars of South and Southeast Asia for sustained inquiry through visits to museums, galleries, studios, archives, and conservation laboratories, alongside workshops on pigment, paper, scent, and food. Walking, making, listening, smelling, tasting, and looking become methods for examining how embodied knowledge shapes historical interpretation. Through these encounters, participants develop a shared vocabulary for a decolonial art history. Public programs, an open digital archive, and a book featuring contributions from the cohort extend this collective inquiry across institutions and geographies.

Application deadline: December 10, 2026 / To apply: Guidelines and application / Inquiries: saai@berkeley.edu

About the UC Berkeley South Asia Art Initiative
The South Asia Art Initiative (SAAI) at the University of California, Berkeley, fosters research, dialogue, and collaboration on the arts of South Asia and its diaspora, from antiquity to the present. An incubator for critical inquiry and creative practice, SAAI is shaped by the research interests of Berkeley faculty and students and by partnerships with scholars, artists, curators, and institutions worldwide. In addition to hosting lectures, conferences, and residencies for artists and scholars, SAAI annually awards the UC Berkeley South Asia Art & Architecture Dissertation Prize and the UC Berkeley South Asia Artist Prize.