TARQ is delighted to present Home-sick, a solo exhibition by artist Garima Gupta. Showcasing a series of works on paper, using graphite, pastels, and collage, the exhibition is on its surface a look at botanical specimens that the artist first came in contact with over her fellowship at Harvard in 2023. The exhibition is accompanied by a text by Veeranganakumari Solanki.
Dig a little deeper, and the exhibition considers sickness as both symptom and witness — a condition through which histories of exhaustion, displacement, and care become perceptible. An unbearable ache, a yearning, a fever dream: homesickness beckons us back to the body, our first and most intimate dwelling. Sickness demands reckoning — an inquiry into what has gone awry, a bid for slowing down, an invitation to return.
The exhibition emerges from a sustained period of research, where Gupta began working with the Herbaria’s records of medicinal plants collected across the Trans-Himalayan belt. In the years since, fieldwork with Amchis, shamans, and foragers across Ladakh, Sikkim, and Kalimpong has taken this inquiry far beyond the archive, bringing her into contact with the people, practices, and landscapes through which medicinal knowledge is held, transmitted, and threatened. This has shaped her understanding of ecology not as something separate from the body, but as an energy field of knowledge reverberating through bodies, gestures, and concoctions.
In the studio, Gupta cut through images of botanical specimens, arranging and rearranging layers of colour-smeared paper into records of climate change and its impact on the very landscapes where these plants originate. Detached from their scientific context, fragments of plant specimens become tactile and associative — moving between botanical record, landscape, animal body, dream, and decay. The drawings attend especially to the fragile, broken, folded, and deteriorating parts of specimens: details overlooked in the pursuit of the whole, here turned into records of ecological vulnerability.
The work is anchored in specific plants — Rheum australe, Neopicrorhiza scrophulariiflora, Aconitum heterophyllum, Delphinium vestitum — each carrying its own history of medicinal use, endangerment, and irreplaceable knowledge. As Gupta encountered communities for whom the extinction of a plant means the loss of a medicine, a practice, or the ability to pass knowledge on, the work grew into something larger: a meditation on what disappears when a species disappears, and what it means to attend, carefully, to what remains.
Home-sick is an act of deep looking — at specimens, at landscapes, at the gestures through which knowledge is carried — and a reckoning with the bodies, human and botanical, that bear the cost of a warming world.
This exhibition has a sister show taking place at the Serendipity Arts Festival 2026, Goa, curated and directed by Garima Gupta and Pravah Khandekar. Conceived as a hybrid, multimedia musical performance and installation integrating live sonic improvisation, spoken word, and video projection, the work stages a relationship between human physiology, the intelligence embedded within matter, and the trans-Himalayan landscape, home to unique medicinal plants and long-evolving healing knowledge systems.
About the Artist
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.
