Three hundred million years ago, Pangaea shattered. Ice held, then melted. Continents drifted. Creatures moved. We followed.

Now, land is carved into grids, the sky sliced into flight paths, the sea patrolled in waves. Satellites trace migrations. Drones track crossings. Borders hold—until they don’t. A creature steps over, its name shifts: native, invasive, pest.

A butterfly that drinks blood—marvel or menace? A fly on the wall, waiting to be swatted. The elephant, sacred in the wild, condemned in the fields. A pest is that which does not serve. So we intervene. Erase the sparrows, and the locusts rise. Deploy the mongoose against rats, only to find them curled beside each other. Each correction mutates the balance; each extermination rewires the system.

Like moths to a flame, we return to control. We open a can of worms. Spin a web of laws. When vermin cannot be killed, they are sanctified. We catalogue, breed, eradicate. A registry emerges, tracking termites burrowing deep.

Beneath the shifting soil, something else stirs—spliced, spored, self-seeding. Neither native nor invasive. Something unknown.

This exhibition unpacks the politics of pests—how power decides which lives are tolerated and which must be removed. From seed banks to invasive creepers and monoculture plantations, it unravels the entangled histories of preservation and control. Through video, sound, and research, the works examine the shifting boundaries between intervention and adaptation, questioning what it means to coexist with the species we attempt to manage.

Participating artists:
Abhinav Suresh, Asim Waqif, Dornith Doherty, Koumudi Malladi, Pratyay Raha, Sonali Kanavi