Garima Gupta (b. 1985) is a researcher and artist based in New Delhi, India. She documents micro-stories and events considered tenuous in ecological wars. In brining these flotsams of ecological wreckage, her work invites us to witness as this refuse transforms into molecules of loss, migration, wants, imaginations, obsessions, frivolity and attachment - beckoning a change with and within, for a radically robust future of our ecosphere.
Her fieldwork confides in drawing, film making and writing as a petition for documenting fringe narratives and critical auditing of archives - speculating, fabulating - that which is not uttered and seldom imagined. Recent sites of her inquiry include Ladakh, Sikkim, Kalimpong, Darjeeling and Spiti Valley. Here, she has been developing a long-term project on the medicinal plants of the trans-Himalayan belt, documenting traditional knowledge systems, the urgent impacts of climate change on these species and the consequences of their loss for the ancient knowledge systems of Himalayan ecosystems.
Geographies of past fieldwork include Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Thailand where she had been documenting trade in wildlife.
Her 5-year long research project based on fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asian archipelago culminated into a solo show, Filed Under: a/muse/um at TARQ, Mumbai in 2020. Her group shows include, Our Conspiring Hosts (Delhi, India), NAYA ANJOR (Delhi, India), EVENT, MEMORY, METAPHOR (Mumbai, India), A BEAST, A GOD AND A LINE at Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh), Para Site (Hong Kong) and Museum of Modern Art (Poland), Kunsthall Trondheim (Norway). Her works are in the collection at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. Her artworks on minerals from the Peabody collection were featured under the project Out of Place: A British Mineralogy at Yale University in 2021. Most recently, she was the Visiting Artist Fellow at the Mittal Institute, Harvard University in 2023.