Photography by Biju Ibrahim
Ecology, Migration, and Spirituality
Date: Sunday, 14 December 2025
Time: 4 – 6 PM
Venue: URU Art Harbour
Speakers: James Onley, Dr. Varuni Bhatia, Dr. Susmita Mohanty
Moderated by Prof. M.H. Ilias
How do we sense, narrate, and imagine life in a time of climate collapse, migratory displacement, and spiritual search? This conference furnaces an understanding of art in the age of precarity through the relationship between ecology, migration and spirituality – a triadic relationship that speaks eloquently of evanescent ecologies, forgotten histories, travels and transformations and unique forms of spiritual explorations. The panel assembles a diverse group of thinkers to explore amphibian aesthetics – a frame that can precisely make sense of hybridity, adaptation, and fragility across environments, histories, and belief systems.
Moderated by M.H. Ilias, the discussion will traverse shifting landscapes-biological, historical, and spiritual-inviting us to consider art and thought as amphibious acts of survival, memory, and reinvention.
James Onley is a historian of South Asian diasporas, examines the early migrations of Indian communities and their aesthetic legacies-especially in music and visual culture-across two centuries of movement, labour, and transformation.
Dr. Varuni Bhatia is a scholar of South Asian studies whose research explores the intersections of religion, politics, and history in colonial and postcolonial India. She is the author of Unforgetting Chaitanya: Vaishnavism and Cultures of Devotion in Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2017), and her work engages deeply with questions of memory, identity, and nationalism.
Dr. Susmita Mohanty is a spaceship designer, entrepreneur, and cultural collaborator whose work spans space architecture, climate advocacy, and art-science engagements. Her works link the precarity of planetary life with speculative imaginaries of living beyond Earth, bridging ecological, technological, and artistic futures.