This exhibition brings together three years of work by Chandigarh-born international artist Kanishka Puri. It features 27 photographs that explore the relationship between femininity and nature.
It emerges from encounters with women whose lives and labour are deeply intertwined with the natural world: female lifeguards who understand the sea through its rhythms of calm and rage; women farmers who know the soil, seeds, native plants, and intruders that inhabit their land; and women who protect forests while caring for the communities that live within them. Their knowledge is intimate, embodied, and often inherited and rooted in practices of observation, care, protection, and survival. The work offers a curated glimpse into these relationships, using the motifs of flora, fauna, bodies, and landscapes to consider how women and nature have both been historically framed as objects to be observed, controlled, possessed, or overlooked. Rather than idealizing the female body or the natural landscape, the photographs seek to recognize them as forces: dynamic, knowledgeable, powerful, and capable of resistance and transformation.
At its core, the work questions the roles imposed upon women and the hierarchies that have defined whose knowledge and labour are valued. It looks beyond the familiar associations of femininity with motherhood, domesticity, and nurture, while simultaneously reconsidering care itself as a form of power. The women encountered through this work are not simply caretakers; they are custodians of knowledge, negotiators of unpredictable environments, and active participants in sustaining the worlds around them. These questions become increasingly urgent within the context of the climate crisis. The desire to control nature is inseparable from broader systems of power that determine who is allowed to control, extract, possess, and speak.
While travelling along the coast of Hawaii, I encountered some of the most majestic landscapes I had ever seen, including smoke rising from a lava bed. The volcano did not erupt that week. Yet the anticipation of what might happen beneath the surface became a reminder that the land operates according to its own time. It does not respond to human urgency. Understanding it requires attention, patience, and respect. Photographing plants and animals and observing them closely has further complicated my understanding of the relationship between humans and the natural world. Moving between the micro and the macro, from the fragile movements of a butterfly to the immense scale of an ocean or landscape, creates a space to consider the interconnectedness of living systems. The photographs become a way of asking how attention might transform our relationship to the world around us.
Can a photograph challenge what we believe a woman can become?
Can looking closely become an act of care?
The work does not attempt to provide definitive answers. Instead, it asks us to reconsider the hierarchies through which we encounter both women and nature, and to imagine relationships grounded not in domination, but in attention, reciprocity, care, and equality.