TARQ is delighted to present and the trees sing resistance songs by Rah Naqvi (he/they). Spanning painting, installation, textile, and film, the exhibition brings together Naqvi's most recent body of work — one that threads through grief, faith, lamentation, and resistance, and offers an encounter with material as a site of discovery, memory, and time.
At the heart of their works in this show is a sustained and intimate engagement with soil. Naqvi has spent the past year collecting earth from their mother's garden, returning to it on each visit home, developing pigments, and tracing what they call the "histories of dirt". For Naqvi, soil is a speculative archive: a repository of what has been buried, forgotten, or silenced, and yet also a map of what persists. Alongside this, they work with soil from sites of conflict and worship, wood ash, copper filings, broken brick, rubble, and rusted nails. These are not merely materials but testimonies. This sustained proximity to the natural world has drawn Naqvi back, repeatedly, to the body. The human form appears in the work in increasingly literal terms, the body itself becoming a site through which histories of violence, faith, and survival are held and expressed.
The exhibition is organized around two planes of existence — above ground and below — that together constitute a metaphorical home, a space of safety and shelter built from the tension between them. Below the surface lies an archive of grief and prayer: the act of kneeling and pressing one's forehead to the earth in supplication, the burial of the dead, the bricks of crumbling buildings raining down into rubble. Above, there is the blanket spread across the earth — a body lying upon it, looking up at the open sky. Between these two planes, soil operates as both boundary and threshold: a site of movement and transformation, where decay and growth exist not in opposition but as the twin foundations of one another.
The exhibition's title comes from a film of the same name, in which lamentation is observed on the beating trunks of aged trees. A site of violence is transformed into a site of preservation; its soil, in Naqvi's reckoning, can never be unburdened by the knowledge of what it has witnessed. This gesture — of mourning as archive, and grief as resistance — runs through the entirety of the show. Drawing on their faith, Naqvi reflects on khak-e-shifa as a vessel of memory and a reminder of sacrifice. If grief is the essence of faith, they ask, then its repetition in the face of ongoing atrocity makes mourning itself a living archive.
Naqvi writes: "I've been watching those who endure, turn to prayer, where the act of faith in the face of despair becomes a resistance profound, an attempt to understand, and comprehend prolonged injustice. I am tracing lines between blood and soil — land that bears witness, trees that sing resistance songs."
The exhibition ultimately asks what endures: not supremacy or conquest, but the richness of those who nurtured, made, and resisted — held, always, in the soil.
CLICK HERE TO ENTER THE ONLINE VIEWING ROOM
Rah Naqvi (he/they) is an Indian artist currently based in Amsterdam. Their work engages in narratives themed around religious and societal polarization, often using art as a tool to question structural hegemonies. The materiality and techniques in their work are at play to create familiarity with the viewer; with satire, whimsical props, and themes of softness, you are made to believe something joyous awaits. Rah uses this familiarity, these grounds for communion to navigate more complex and dynamic subjects of belonging and imposed colonial identities. The language of queer defiance extends to their practice of singing, alluding to the polyphonic nature of love and revolution while cautioning against the monotony of a choiceless future.
They studied Liberal Arts at St. Xavier's College, Mumbai and Bachelor of Textiles at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.
Rah had their first solo exhibition titled Bashaoor, at Clark House, Mumbai in 2018, followed by Sharam-o-haya, at Ame Nue, Hamburg (2019); how many songs from a single note?, at TARQ, Mumbai (2022); and when a name is laid to rest: archives of future present past, at AKINCI, Amsterdam (2023).
Rah’s work has most recently been recognized in ART India’s Looking Ahead: 30 under 20 in 2026.
They have exhibited in India and abroad to include group exhibitions, namely The Artist As, curated by Vaidehi Gohil and Sonakshi Bhandari, TARQ, Mumbai (2025); Wrapped in the Shadow of Freedom, curated by Shaunak Mahbubani, organized by Sekhmet Institute at Prishtina Hotel, Kosovo (2024); Outside the soup, W139, holier than thou, Amsterdam (2024); Siblings of the soil, Melkweg Expo, Amsterdam (2024); Images of Power, Textile Biënnale, Museum Rijswijk, Netherlands (2023); Testimonies of othering and their impossibly possible futures, Kunstfort Vijfhuizen, Netherland (2022); Terra Incognita, AKINCI, Amsterdam (2022); Offspring, Always Hallways, De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2021); That those beings be not being, W139, Amsterdam (2021); Hunger, AKINCI, Amsterdam (2020); Inherited Memory, TARQ, Mumbai (2020); Heroines Now, AKINCI, Amsterdam (2019); A beast, a god, a line, curated by Cosmin Costinas, Para Site, Hong Kong (2018); सावधान: The Regimes of Truth, curated by Shaunak Mahbubani, Apexart NY, New Delhi (2018); Micro subversions Playbook, curated by Avni Sethi and Venkataraman Divakar, Conflictorium, Ahmedabad (2018); and The Exhaustion project, curated by Abhijan Toto, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2018).
They have participated in the De Ateliers Residency program in 2019-2021. They have also been part of the Forecast Forum Residency, Berlin in 2018. They were the recipient of Artist Basic grant, Mondriaan Fonds (2025); Catalyst grant, Goa Open Arts (2024); Stichting Stokoos grant (2023); Artist Start Grant, Mondriaan Fonds (2022); Queer Twenty (2021); Stichting Niemeijer Fonds (2021); The Phenomenal she award conferred by the Indian National Bar Association (2019), and NID Ford Foundation Grant (2018).
