The third edition of Sustaina India, titled Bitter Nectar, unfolds as a quiet but insistent meditation on climate change, one that refuses spectacle. Instead. it embeds itself in the most intimate of routines. Eating, cooking, carrying, and waiting. Curated by Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, the Delhi-based artist duo whose practice spans painting, archiving, gaming, publishing, and long-term engagement with ecology and climate change, Sustaina India, on till February 14 at Bikaner House, New Delhi, approaches the climate crisis through food systems and fruiting cycles.
“Food is the base of what we do,” says Tagra. “We connect with people or what we have thrice a day… it is basic, very much rooted into our day’s routine.” Food, for Tagra, is not an entry point chosen for symbolism but for necessity. “We also understand the food is very much related to the economy and the part and parcel that I have to eat to fill my stomach.” Because food sits at the intersection of care, labour, culture, and survival, even subtle disruptions become deeply felt. “Taste changes and the dialect changes… each house has a particular kind of a cooking… as many religions and as many people and as many ways how we see it, it shifts you know.”
The exhibition’s title holds that unease—Bitter Nectar is deliberately contradictory. “Yes, it is. It doesn’t sit well because we are actually stuck between the right and the wrong,” Tagra says. The discomfort mirrors contemporary life, living with pollution, dependence on contested technologies, and growing uncertainty around what we consume. “What do you eat at this time when everything is shifting its taste or not?” he asks. “Why the nectar is bitter… what happens if the sweetness is changing its taste?” Dietary changes, lactose intolerance, altered crops, and unstable harvests are not hypothetical futures. “This is a time where the bitterness is actually coming from our heart.”
Bitter Nectar is also the culmination of a longer curatorial journey. “We began with the idea of eyes on the ground, heart on the horizon… The second was about singing with each seed… And the third is the fruiting of it,” Tagra explains. Fruiting, here, is not celebration but consequence, the result of labour, patience, and unequal reward. “It’s to do with this labour… the pursuit of sweetness… the reward system.” The exhibition repeatedly returns to the question of access. “Who gets what kind of sweetness… who gets what kind of fruit?” Tagra asks. “The matrix is not even… it is a many layer of the socio-political understanding of what kind of fruit you are eating.”
Fruiting as Consequence
Those layers are made tangible through the work of the three Sustaina India Fellows, each rooted in a distinct landscape and food system. Mrugen Rathod turns to the mango to reflect on monocultures and forest ecologies in Gir. His sculptural installation grows out of long-term research into river systems and forest-farm boundaries, revealing how conservation and cultivation collapse into single-species logics. Mango orchards promise livelihood even as they reshape biodiversity, wildlife movement, and land use. Rathod’s repeated Kesari lion forms, mounted on wheels and marked by fruit, trace this uneasy transition, asking whether adaptation is voluntary or compelled by scarcity.
In Ladakh, Anuja Dasgupta works with the apricot to explore seasonal knowledge under pressure. Long central to sustenance and memory in the Sham Valley, the apricot becomes a measure of climatic instability as warming nights and erratic rainfall disrupt harvest cycles. Her work foregrounds how climate change unsettles not only crops but time itself, placing strain on indigenous knowledge systems built through careful observation of seasons.
Milk, perhaps the most ordinary substance in the exhibition, anchors the work of Vedant Patil, the filmmaker who has worked with the film as a medium, traces its movement across rural and urban networks. As Tagra describes, “He’s an ethnographer and a PhD candidate. It is how he sees his friends, who are also featured in the film, bringing their milk cans from point A to point B. And through these ways of communicating or documenting, he kind of opens up a very delicate balance between the time the milk is carried to the home… fighting this entire tension between bringing it before it gets spoiled. That is their value system.” Even the way milk cans are angled at the exhibition, laid down to prevent spillage and double as seats, becomes part of a choreography shaped by urgency, care, and precarity. Patil’s work reveals how nourishment is sustained through fragile infrastructures and invisible labour, increasingly stressed by climate variability.
Beyond the Gallery
The exhibition’s physical and institutional design reinforces these concerns. There are no works on walls, no commodities to buy or sell. Everything sits close to the ground. “We say the art is like walls are for commodities as a gallery system is. So we don’t want that work,” Tagra explains. The open call that feeds Sustaina India follows the same ethic. “There’s no gender issue, there’s no education issue… anybody can apply.” Applications arrive from across India, PhD candidates, master’s students, rural practitioners, designers, ethnographers, textile workers. “We felt really overwhelmed and warm by this opportunity which people are waiting for to happen.”
For Thukral, the most significant outcome is the community Sustaina has quietly built. “It’s like building a community. Today we have 33 artists, all coming from Sustaina. Now they’re networking with each other.” Artists travel across regions, exchange research, and learn from one another without formal intention. “That unknowingly knowledge-sharing… that was the more important.”
This emphasis on lived experience and shared knowledge aligns closely with the position of Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), which collaborates on Sustaina India. CEEW’s engagement stems from a recognition that climate change is no longer a distant or sectoral issue, but one that is already shaping food systems, labour patterns, and household economies. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and shifting seasons are altering how food is produced, distributed, and consumed, especially for communities already operating at the margins. For CEEW, Bitter Nectar demonstrates how climate impacts are felt not only through extreme events but through everyday disruptions, such as changing crop yields, unstable prices, nutritional stress, over-tourism and the erosion of seasonal knowledge.
Set against the speed and saturation of art fair week, Bitter Nectar insists on a slower attention. “It is a very rare case that in the time of the art fair, something like this is happening,” Tagra notes. Footfall is high, curiosity genuine, but the emphasis remains on holding space rather than producing gloss. “We don’t want any glossy textures.” The third edition feels more consolidated, aware of its imperfections, and willing to learn from them. “It’s not everything is glossy… we are quite aware to kind of accept that things could have been more smoother.”
Bitter Nectar ultimately offers neither alarm nor reassurance. Instead, it asks viewers to notice, to recognise climate change in taste, labour, memory, and access. The sweetness may still exist, but it arrives altered, carrying the aftertaste of imbalance. As Sustaina India III makes clear, the climate story is already on our plates. The question is whether we are willing to sit with its bitterness, and what that recognition might compel the audience to change.