AgriForum: Acts of Re/Collection

as part of the Bergen Assembly 2025
across, with, nearby convened by
Ravi Agarwal, Adani Shibli, and Bergen School of Architecture (BAS)

11 Sept - 9 November 2025

AgriForum: Acts of Re/Collection opened at Bergen Kunsthall, with Sanchayan Ghosh, Rashmi Kaleka, Malavika Bhatia, Ankan Dutta, Gram Art Project, Blaise Joseph, Shubham Kumar, Maksud Ali Mondal, Anga Art Collective, Ashis Palei, Bhikari Pradhan, Gopa Roy, Sheshadev Sagria, Niroj Satpathy, Umesh S, Gyanwant Yadav.

Facilitated by Vidya Shivadas, Annalisa Mansukhani, Stuti Bhavsar

Founded in response to the need for a space to support artistic engagements with the agrarian, AgriForum first began in 2021 as an online reading group for artists and collectives across India whose work is locally rooted in landscape, ecology and community. Since then, it has evolved into a growing network focused on the agrarian as site and concept, mediated by shared enquiry into its many material vocabularies. For across, with, nearby, AgriForum returns to its central question: how do we read the field across forms, methods, and modalities? The project takes shape as a library, offering spaces for reading, gathering, and learning with different artistic and agrarian practices. Here, artist books, workbooks, stories, and speculative propositions gather as a dispersed commons for collaborative encounters.

Under a newly commissioned shamiana (a tent or canopy used as a sheltered space for gatherings) by artist Sanchayan Ghosh diverse practices convene with processual and embodied ways of listening, alongside other works shown in collaboration with Bergen Assembly. This iteration of the AgriForum library extends its ongoing efforts of hosting learning modules, exhibitions, and site-specific explorations that examine histories and urgencies of the agrarian. Inviting these interdisciplinary methods and material forms into new conversations and constellations, this latest gathering becomes an exigent meeting point — fertile scaffolding for participatory structures, pedagogic experiments and emergent solidarities.

AgriForum is a platform hosted by the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), which brings together artists and collectives from across India whose practices respond to their lived and immediate geographies. The platform supports a multiplicity of approaches, fostering critical dialogue and collaboration around the sociopolitical and ecological dimensions of the agrarian. Building connections across topographies and cultural-ecological frameworks, AgriForum’s activities centre on issues including food sovereignty, multispecies relationalities, regenerative possibilities, tools and toolsets, the role of Indigenous knowledge systems, acts of resistance, and extractive apparatuses. Fostering ecologies of care, the platform continues to gather with voices and alliances working to reconfigure our shared understandings of land, soil, seed, root, and spirit.