From riverbanks to global watersheds, from the archives of natural history to the lived entanglements of species, from Delhi’s local ecologies to planetary instabilities. Marking Agarwal’s first solo exhibition at Gallery Espace in a decade, the exhibition reframes his longstanding environmental practice within a new conceptual lens: the idea of a denaturalised history, a counter-archive to the long tradition of historia naturalis.

Natural history was never merely descriptive. It was a world-making operation: an attempt to stabilise life into legible units whose meaning and value could be controlled from imperial centres. What appeared as neutral classification was in fact a profound geopolitical act — a way of reorganising relationships between humans and the nonhuman world so that they aligned with the demands of extraction and capital. Species were not only named; they were claimed.

Historia Denaturalis seeks to invert this gesture. Instead of ordering life into transparent categories, it foregrounds opacity, relationality, and the limits of human knowledge. It insists that beings — whether riverine plants in North India or cacao trees in West Africa, whether Himalayan herbs or urban birds — cannot be reduced to the grids through which empire once sought to read them. A denaturalised history refuses the fantasy of mastery. It attends to the worlds that classification obscured: worlds shaped by kinship, by Indigenous knowledge, by resistance, by multispecies entanglement. It proposes that to understand a plant or an animal, a glacier or a river, is not to name it, but to recognise the histories and relations it carries — including the histories of violence that have rendered it visible in the museum and invisible in its place of origin.
Central to this exhibition is a meditation on perception: not only how humans see nonhuman life, but how nonhuman life perceives us. As John Berger wrote, the relation between human and animal is one of looking—a crossing of gazes that reveals a “narrow abyss of non-comprehension.” This asymmetry does not negate relation; it animates it. The animal’s gaze unsettles the human one. As Berger argues, animals possess “secrets … specifically addressed to man,” secrets of presence and relation that resist assimilation into human categories. Their opacity is not emptiness but a form of meaning.

Agarwal’s practice embraces this reciprocity. Whether photographing along the Yamuna, documenting industrial-waste ecologies, or observing riverine movements, he foregrounds perception as a shared—though asymmetrical—ecology. He acknowledges that multispecies encounters exceed human understanding, and that the world is not only seen by us, but also seeing us.

Damian Christinger