Kochi: The ongoing three-month long Kochi-Muziris Biennale at Fort Kochi, India, showcases art from the country and across the world. Topics range from caste, gender, human and land rights. People and their links to nature and the environment also find a place in this list. Here’s a photo story from The Wire listing some of them.

1. A story of displacement and bonds

The 1960s and 70s were decades when big dams arrived in India: something that Goa, like other states, also witnessed. The Salaulim dam, commissioned in 1961 across the Salaulim river in south Goa, was one of them. Like in the case of most big dams, it displaced people as well: 3,000 families, in all. Twenty villages including Curdi and Kurpem were submerged. Villagers left, unwillingly. Every summer, however, the dam’s water recedes. Villagers flock back to their mud-swept homes. They sing songs about their homes and ritually re-occupy the ruins by cleaning them – to remember what they lost. Goa-based artist Sahil Naik’s work replicates these ruins.

2. Change in the Changthang

Another dam and its impacts – this time in north Sikkim’s high-altitude Changthang landscape – find place in the Biennale through the work of Ruchika Negi and Amit Mahanti. Photographs displayed via light boxes document the impacts of the Teesta III dam on the Teesta river and the resulting destructive environmental change on people, through snapshots of scarred mountains and “confused words” (as the write up on the work at the Biennale says).

3. Coal mining and unrest in Chhattisgarh:

Ishan Tankha's installations on display at Aspinwall, titled 'A Peal of Spring Thunder' highlight the life of Chhattisgarh's people and the environment. Set in the backdrop of the violence and unrest in the state, the installation documents the impacts on people due to coal mining in their forests, coupled with the impacts of the government’s crackdown on the Maoist movement.

4. Superb glory: Depictions of nature and culture

Kerala metaphysical artist G.S. Smitha’s vibrant and detailed illustrations depict wildlife and people in forests. Oft-ignored or lesser-known species dot the canvas, as do people and forest gods donning colorful masks.

This painting, for instance, features the Superb lily, Gloriosa superba, with its curved red and yellow blooms in the foreground, and above it, a wild fig tree with a fruit-laden bark.

5. Architecture and nature:

Designed by Samira Rathod, the Biennale Pavilion at Cabral Yard – a performance venue – is constructed entirely of construction debris. A bamboo installation by Delhi-based Asim Waqif, whose work weaves ecology and anthropology, is also on display at Aspinwall.

6. The stories that ice tells:

One of the installations on display as part of Swiss-Canadian researcher Susan Schuppli’s 'Listening to ice' is a documentary titled Gondwana. It touches on aspects including the history of India’s research in Antarctica and the links between space explorations and the Indian monsoon.

7. Climate change:

Rise in temperature in the high mountains of the world is a concern as climate change unfolds. European artist Uriel Orlow’s lengthy installation of color swatches titled 'Up Up Up: Himalayan Drift' depicts the shifts in the intensity of this phenomenon between 1900 and 2020. It includes climate data from mountain systems including the Swiss Alps and Himalaya.

8. Coasts under threat:

Turkey-based artist Alper Aydin’s 'The Song of the World' features photographs of some of the 208 last-remaining rocks along a 37-km coastline from Turkey to Georgia, a stretch that is now under threat due to extraction.

9. “Go Back to Roots”:

The drawings of Bangladeshi artist Joydeb Roaja – who belongs to one of the Jumma tribes in the Chittagong hills of the country – illustrate the Jumma peoples’ culture, practices and links to nature.

10. Gold mining in the Amazon:

Forensic Architecture, a London-based research agency that investigates human rights violations, has put on display a documentary of how the increase in gold mining in the Amazonian rainforests is linked to Jair Bolsonaro’s time in office as president of Brazil since 2019, and how it has affected the rainforest and its people.

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