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Multi-disciplinary artist Manjot Kaur invites us to consider a world beyond human-centric narratives, offering a glimpse into alternate worlds where non-human beings take centre stage. In a recent interview with Art Fervour, she let us in on her creative process and the complex layers that inform her recent body of speculative works, each serving as a portal to a reimagined world often populated by hybrid beings, goddesses that birth ecosystems, and interspecies entanglements.
Detail of When a Tree Grew Out of Her Womb, 2021. Gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Latitude 28.
In an era where nature and culture are often viewed as separate entities, Manjot expresses her concern regarding the path that has led to this divide and prompts contemplation about potential alternatives. To bridge the gap, she draws upon historical cultural symbols and devises new narratives using the vocabulary of South and Southwest Asian miniature painting traditions.
Trees Invoking Wadjet, 2024. Gouache and watercolour on Wasli paper. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Latitude 28.
For Manjot, non-human entities such as trees, birds, animals and entire ecosystems occasionally assume the role of the protagonist.
In more recent work she portrays forests as active agents in their own wellbeing. For instance, in Trees Invoking Wadjet, trees gather to discuss their rights with the Egyptian goddess Wadjet, who is believed to protect the land and women in childbirth. Such fictionalised reimaginings acknowledge and respect the autonomy and intrinsic value of the ecological kin with whom we share this earth.
Detail of Hybrid Being 1, Utka and The White Bellied Heron, 2022. Gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Gallerie Caroline O’Breen.
In Hybrid Beings, a series of paintings that reference the ashta-nayika, eight heroines that appear in Indian art and literature, birds – some endangered or extinct – replace the male love interest of the protagonist. With the body of a woman and the head of a bird, the hybrid heroines are depicted in different stages of their relationship with a non-human nayaka. In Hybrid Being I, Utkanayika waits anxiously for her absent lover – the White Bellied Heron, a critically endangered bird native to the foothills of the eastern Himalayas, Bhutan and northern Myanmar.
These kinds of interspecies entanglements, referencing familiar icons, ask us to read ecological and mythic stories on a planetary scale.
Detail of While She Births an Ecosystem, 2020. Gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Latitude 28.
Through her depictions of fertility goddesses such as Lajja Gauri, an ancient Indian deity symbolising abundance and fertility, and Taweret, the ancient Egyptian protector goddess of maternity and childbirth, Manjot invites us to reimagine a symbiotic relationship between the divine feminine and the natural world.
She represents the female form free from traditional notions of motherhood, depicting the goddesses birthing an ecosystem rather than a human child.
Detail of Forest invoking Vaishnavi, 2024. Gouache and watercolour on Wasli paper. Courtesy of the artist.
Manjot’s work delicately navigates between preserving the integrity of icons that she draws from and reinterpreting them using the power of storytelling. Despite the risk of causing offence, she embraces the challenge of rewriting cultural symbols, arguing that her works draw from reality but do not represent it. She believes that artists play a vital role in envisioning and shaping a more inclusive and sustainable world, and acknowledges her responsibility to respond to the call for reimagining our future.
Detail of Hybrid Being 3, 2022. Gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Latitude 28.
Her work showcases a deep connection with nature, featuring non-human beings as central to the narratives she creates. However, as an artist, she questions the notion of humans speaking on behalf of nature.
“Who am I to speak for trees or birds?” she points out, asserting that her work aims to create discourse surrounding non-human entities rather than claiming to represent them entirely.
The meticulous portrayal of the natural world in her works is testament to her desire to engage in dialogue with the environment around her. It appears to be an ongoing conversation, perhaps one that Manjot has while spending time among the trees in the temperate forest near her home in Vancouver.
Detail of When the Wilderness Invoked, 2023. Gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Latitude 28.
She cherishes her solitude and finds joy in the research aspect of her work. Key titles in her library include Donna Haraway’s ‘Staying With the Trouble’ and Anna Tsings’s ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’, which have deeply influenced her understanding of interspecies partnership and non-human narratives. She also enjoys visiting museums and studying historical miniature paintings from India, Pakistan, and Iran, which in turn enrich her artistic vocabulary.
Detail of Hybrid Being 9, Svadhintapatika and The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, 2023. Gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Gallerie Caroline O’Breen.
During the painting phase of her process, Manjot likes to engage her senses, incorporating fragrances in her studio to stimulate her subconscious. She also finds pleasure in listening to songs, audiobooks, podcasts, and lectures, as well as films she’s watched before, such as In the Mood for Love, movies from Studio Ghibli, Star Wars, Disney’s Silly Symphonies from the 1990s, The Color of Pomegranates, Solaris and more. Her current favourite movie is Poor Things, for its blend of comedy, science and sci-fi, and its portrayal of the protagonist’s worldview, sexuality as well as the themes of freedom and control.
Detail of Polymorphous Seed 3, 2023. Gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Latitude 28.
Earlier this year, her work was featured by Galerie Caroline O’Breen at INVESTEC Cape Town Art Fair in South Africa. At Art Dubai, her art was exhibited by Latitude 28 as part of their presentation titled ‘Ecosystems are Love Stories’. Her new body of work was showcased at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong as part of an exhibition titled ‘Green Snake: women-centred ecologies’, curated by Kathryn Weir. Following a well-deserved break, Manjot is gearing up for her upcoming exhibitions, ‘Animal Farm,’ curated by Julia Geerlings, at the Rijswijk Museum and at Onomatopee in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
Get to Know the Artist
Describe your art in a few words: Mythic Fiction; Multispecies Justice; Decentring the Human; Nature Rights!
Favourite artists right now: AES+F; Sandro Botticelli; Heague Yang; Purkhu; and Nainsukh.
What are you listening to currently? Anoushka Shankar; Hariprasad Chaurasia; Fareed Ayaaz and Abu Muhammad.
The last exhibition you saw? Art Basel, Hong Kong; Green Snake: women-centred ecologies, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong; Art Dubai; Can You Hear Me by Nalini Malini at Concrete, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai; It Lies Beyond by Rashid Rana at Volte Art Gallery, Dubai
Your advice for new artists? Perseverance and discipline.
Favourite place to create art: My studio in Vancouver and Chandigarh; my parents’ place in Ludhiana.
What do you do to get out of a creative block? Haven’t witnessed one as yet as the painting phase is so time consuming, that ideas for the next three arrive before the previous work is complete. But I would watch Movies, go for a walk in the forest, meet friends and talk to people.
