When Kulpreet Singh speaks about his work, he sounds more like a farmer than an artist. A graduate of Panjab University’s Fine Arts department, Singh, in the examination of his work, is conspicuously shorn of the esotericism that artists are wont to display. In his farm studio in Patiala—around which he grows okra, bottle gourd, leafy vegetables, sponge gourds, turmeric, and a variety of fruits—the 40-year-old artist delves into themes such as grain pricing, groundwater depletion, stubble burning, the desilting of dams, and the ecological and economic brutalities that spurred India’s widespread farmer protests.
“One needn’t be offensive when we employ art to talk about these issues,” he insists. “Through my work I want to establish a critical dialogue around the existential crisis faced by farmers, one in which we can first comprehend how each of us is part of the problem and then collectively figure out ways in which we can be part of the solution. For example, look at me. Even though I have grown up in the farmlands of Punjab, the land of the Green Revolution, I was not aware of the harmful effects of pesticides—the magnitude of it—till as late as 2017, when I attended a workshop on organic farming.”
Singh is not the throw-paint-at-artworks kind of climate-urgent voice. In fact, his latest work, ‘Green Revolution’, part of a group show, All Stories Are About Us: A Climate Recipes Survey, currently on display at the Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, bears acrylic paint drawings on rice paper sandwiched with stubble ash, dipped in pesticides, and subjected to laser. The complex narrative, centred on the steady erosion of the earth’s biodiversity, is led by a cluster of 1,000 small panels bearing diagrammatic sketches of reptiles, birds, insects, fungi, and plants that have gone extinct. This outpouring of angst is crowned by two years of keen research and study of the conservation status data put up by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. “Even as we scream for our human rights, there are many species on earth that are slipping away quietly, unnoticed,” he points out. “The void left behind by each of these creatures and organisms will go on to affect our lives and those of the future generations. We are all interconnected, and I wish we realise sooner how deeply.”
Besides sounding off the wake-up call on environmental peril, Singh’s works stay faithful to a recurring theme—the existential crisis faced by farmers. One of his works under development involves a translation of the word ‘farmer’ in over 25 national and international languages. He has imprinted the words in residual ash sourced from cooking stoves used at farmer protest sites, and later rendered them with tear-gas-shell shadow cast. “Did you know there are so many countries around the world, including Europe, where farmers give up their lives because of the sheer misery inflicted by constrictive agricultural policies?” he asks, his voice a little weary now.
In the past, some of Singh’s works have relied on ash sourced respectfully from cremation grounds where he volunteered during COVID-19. A part of his studio houses bags of soil brought over from Medha Patkar’s mitti satyagraha, a protest march that wove its way from Dandi in Gujarat to the Singhu border in Delhi as an act of resistance against the new farm laws. During the march, soil from various places was collected to create a memorial for the 738 farmers who died during the protests. The menacing iron nails, chains, and other forms of barricade that were placed to prevent farmers from staging the protest also find an echo in Singh’s exhibit, Fossils of Force.
Even to an untrained eye, it is obvious that his process is inextricably tied to emotional participation, and Singh has built a formidable reputation for this unique approach. Earlier this year, Singh’s work was showcased to wide applause at the prestigious JSW & The Times of India Earth Care Award (2025), which underlined his status as one of India’s most compelling environmental voices in contemporary art.
His series Indelible Black Marks featured large canvases that had been dragged across burning stubble fields and consequentially embedded with angry traces of agricultural residue. The unusual act of quiet protest gave way to a haunting record of environmental degradation that was also exhibited at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, where a dramatic overhang of farmers' kurtas, made entirely of stubble remnants, ignited a fresh discourse on climate change, biodiversity, and sustainable farming. What at first may have seemed like a row of intimidating scarecrows was actually symbolic of the farmer as he stands suspended in his fight to survive and stay relevant amid oppressive land rights, mounting debts, low crop yields, and catastrophic environmental deterioration.
