The Night Life of Trees

January 1, 2007-January 1, 2007
Location: Asia Collection

The Night Life of Trees exhibition brings together work by Bhajju Shyam, Ram Singh Urveti and Durga Bai, three of the finest living artists of the Gond tribal tradition.

The exhibition consists of original artwork from the book The Night Life of Trees, which pays tribute to the beauty of the natural world and the interrelatedness of all life. The Gond tribe of Madhya Pradesh in central India are traditionally forest dwellers, and trees form the focal point of their cosmos. They believe that trees are hard at work during the day, providing shade, shelter and nourishment for all; but at night, when all the daytime visitors have left, the spirits of the trees reveal themselves.

It is these luminous spirits that are captured in The Night Life of Trees a fascinating and haunting foray into the Gond imagination, in which the aesthetic and spiritual aspects of the natural world are inseparable, and each image is an article of faith.

The tribe works in a ritual and functional art style with distinctive decorative elements, mostly painted on walls of houses, and using natural colours. Each canvas in the exhibition is accompanied by text narrated by the artists themselves describing a legend, myth or folktale associated with each individual tree.

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