What is a pest? Or rather, who is a pest? And who makes this classification? An ongoing exhibition at Khoj, New Delhi, called Pest Politics explores how human beings have played god, assuming control over the future and space of various life forms in the ecosystem. But in the pristine natural expanses that remain relatively undisturbed by anthropogenic activities, humans themselves become the pests.
Exhibits by each of the six artists, whose work is showcased at the gallery until March 29, 2025, aim to expose this unfair power tussle between humans, weeds, and bugs.
Echoes of Extraction by sound artists Abhinav Suresh and Pratyay Raha uses ambient frequencies to depict the shrinking space for life forms other than humans in Valparai’s tea plantations. The duo recorded the soundscape of four habitats — human settlements, plantations, preserved rainforests, and restored forests. The audio recordings were visually represented using a spectrogram — a type of graph that plots the loudness of a signal over time. In the preserved rainforests and restored forests, the spectrogram displayed a wide diversity of amplitudes, with soft murmurs coexisting with relatively higher intensities of natural sounds during the period of observation.
In the human settlements, loud noises dominated, flattening the spectrogram with their overwhelming intensities. The lower-intensity sounds that were clearly audible in the undisturbed wooded areas were no longer perceptible, entirely replaced by music blaring from passing buses and trucks, people chattering and shouting, and the mechanical clanking and whirring of pesticide machines.
No wonder, then, that the human-made plantations were “sonically dead”, as the artists described them. The seemingly tranquil landscape of green bushes stretching as far as the eye can see was silent because smaller life forms, deemed “pests”, had been eliminated to ensure bountiful harvests for human consumption and profit.
Anthropogenic sound is a deadly weapon against ecology. Whales, bats, birds, and many other wild species use sound to communicate and navigate through echolocation. Urban noise interferes with this process, leading to grave consequences for these species.
House sparrows are one example, said Suresh. These small birds often struggle to communicate mating or feeding calls, disrupting vital activities necessary for their survival and propagation.
Even among humans, pest politics harm some communities while benefiting others. In Plucked from the Fringe, Bengaluru-based designer and artist Sonali Kanavi immortalises plant species dismissed as weeds by preserving them in resin, transforming them into beautiful frames. The artist aims to highlight the nutritional importance of these neglected species for some indigenous communities.
Kanavi collected edible flora from north Karnataka’s semi-arid regions, along with soil and plastic waste from areas where such wild vegetation thrives. Through the latter, she sought to depict how, despite their ecological and cultural significance to marginalised communities, these plants remain unprotected.
American photographer Dorinth Doherty’s microscopy image series Phylloxera on the eponymous root-feeding insect attempts a similar exercise. This species was responsible for the Great French Wine Blight in the 19th century when infected vines from the Americas were brought to France to develop a new variety. While grapevines in the Americas were resistant to phylloxera, European varieties perished. Had it not been for the grafting of American rootstock with European scions — a practice that has now become standard — Europe’s wine industry might have been entirely lost.
The artist tells this story through sepia-toned images of phylloxera galls, which also serve as a nod to the invention of photography, which coincided with the blight. The series evokes memories of the damage caused by the irresponsible transfer of species to geographies where they do not belong.
Her other series on display, Archiving Eden, features magnified X-ray images of seeds and tissue samples preserved in seed banks. These works are both visually striking and scientifically significant, reminiscent of the practices that have helped humans ensure nutritional security for future generations.
The exhibition, curated by Gayatri Manu — part of the 2024 cohort of the Curatorial Intensive South Asia — also features Autobiography of an Ecosystem by multidisciplinary practitioner Koumudi Malladi.
This piece explores how humans and nature influence each other within the diverse layers of the Wayanad landscape. “The work highlights the fragile balance sustaining biodiversity and the unintended consequences of economic expansion,” Manu wrote in her concept note.
Attendees are also encouraged to participate in seed bombing at an abandoned building opposite the venue, as part of architect-artist Asim Waqif’s long-term intervention on natural decay and the regreening of concretised spaces, reclaiming them for nature.