Home-sick Garima Gupta

'TARQ presents Home-sick, a solo exhibition by artist Garima Gupta. Showcasing a series of works on paper, using pastels and collage, the exhibition looks 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.'

Text & Images Courtesy TARQ 
Date 23.10.2026