Special Projects

The Indian subcontinent was a major site of botanical survey by colonial explorers between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. British botanists collected, classified, and circulated plant specimens in service of economic, scientific, and political aims. Central to this enterprise were thousands of botanical drawings produced by skilled Indian artists, which helped shape modern botany. Paper Gardens traces encounters between plants, artists, and garden–institutions, examining the networks of labour and imagination that have built our understanding of the natural world.

A central figure in late twentieth-century Indian art, Jyoti Bhatt has worked across painting, printmaking, and photography since the 1950s. During a period shaped by debates on modernity, tradition, and cultural identity, he travelled across India making thousands of photographs of a changing nation, its people, and its art institutions, especially his alma mater, the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda. This exhibition examined how his photographs challenged hierarchies and broadened the possibilities of photographic expression in post-Independence India.