In ‘We Must Therefore Turn Our Attention Skywards’, multidisciplinary artist Devadeep Gupta situates his practice within one of South Asia’s most heavily extracted ecologies: the Dehing–Patkai rainforest and its surrounding villages. This body of work emerges from and takes place across a terrain where 19th-century British coal mining set in motion a chain of environmental ruination that continues, largely uninterrupted, into the present. In the 1800s, colonial collieries and rail networks devastated the region’s ancient forests and displaced indigenous communities, while the postcolonial state, through neglect and complicity, enabled neo-colonial cartels to inherit this apparatus. Here, extraction is not a past event; instead, it is an ongoing political condition that influences land, labour, culture, and the fabric of life.

Gupta’s project responds to this continued ecological violence by assembling what he describes as “anecdotal and rebellious ruptures in the everyday”: circadian gestures, interspecies encounters, vernacular knowledge practices, and archival fragments that resist extractive logic. In Gupta’s work, these often overlooked and dismissed sites reassert their agency in the contemporary moment. They become counter-archives that map how communities navigate the suffocating presence of the petrochemical-industrial-capitalist complex while continuing to cultivate forms of coexistence, memory, and resistance.

Essential to this body of work is its emphasis on the lived entanglement between ecological destruction and the everyday rhythms of human and more-than-human inhabitants. Gupta does not depict extraction as an abstract policy; instead, he sees it as a force that penetrates migration, kinship, and mortality. Yet, amidst this atmosphere of depletion, Gupta highlights what he calls “fleeting instances of reparative escape” — moments when alternative futures briefly emerge from behind the shadow of desolation. The project’s title signals this shift: to turn one’s gaze skywards is to find possibility in the forest canopy; in the gathering birds whose calls remain one of the last intact sensory archives of a threatened ecosystem.

These birds, whose vocal lineages are preserved through individuals like Bijoy, an indigenous inhabitant of the Soraipung village who communicates with over 200 species of birds, embody a vulnerable indigenous knowledge system and the political residues of a landscape negotiating its survival. At the same time, his brother Ajay steals oil from the Company wells as defiance against their collective dispossession, and the lone elephant Tempu, grieving and untethered, haunts the forest like a living fossil. Their presence is both an ecological testament and a warning: a sonic register of worlds that may vanish if extractive violence is allowed to continue its course.

Through film, sound, and installation, Gupta composes an ecology of encounter where communities, animals, industrial infrastructures, and what he terms “transcendent co-existences” are held in unresolved dialogue. This braiding of narratives — the brine-spring where animals assemble under moonlight, Ajay’s insurgent oil raids challenging corporate ownership of land, the solitary elephant Tempu carrying a trauma that echoes human histories of violence — collectively unsettles the dominant accounts of the region as an industrial frontier. These stories reveal a complex web of symbiosis, conflict, and negotiation among species and structures. They expose the cultural damage wrought by colonial forestry regimes, which devalued indigenous ecological knowledge systems even as they exploited the land that knowledge sustained.

‘We Must Therefore Turn Our Attention Skywards’ was recently presented by the Prameya Art Foundation at the Alserkal Art Week in Dubai from 16 to 23 November 2025. Learn more about the project here.

Follow Devadeep Gupta here.

Here’s more from Homegrown:

‘Eater Eaten’ Is A Dance Macabre Short Film About The Nature Of Mortality

Jawed Sharif’s Gripping Documentary Spotlights The Plight Of Pakistan’s Boat People

Conscious Collective 2025 Will Explore Design As A Tool For Climate Survival