Navjot Altaf’s landfill paintings turn the museum into a site of uneasy recognition

In a city where land is perpetually remade, the landfill can feel like both an endpoint and a beginning. Navjot Altaf’s Waste Archives as Landscape, now on view at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Gallery in Mumbai, resists the comfort of either position. Instead, it lingers in a more unsettled terrain, where debris accumulates as evidence and environment alike.

Altaf’s gouache paintings draw on the visual language of botanical illustration, a form once entangled with colonial ambitions to catalogue and control the natural world. Here, that same precision attends to mounds of refuse, rendering waste with an almost devotional attention. The effect is disorienting. These are not landscapes in any passive sense; they insist on being read as sites of consequence. Waste appears less as residue than as record, bearing the imprint of consumption, migration, and neglect.

The exhibition unfolds through multiple lenses rather than a single interpretive frame. Curator Puja Vaish resists narrowing the work to a singular argument, preferring instead to “allow layered frameworks to emerge through the work”. One such framework treats the landfill as a kind of forensic ground, where materials speak to the conditions that produced them. This attention to systems extends beyond the pictorial. In Take–Make–Waste, a suspended grid of PVC pipes releases fragments of electronic waste through a concealed mechanism. The work gestures towards global circuits of disposal, recalling how discarded materials travel from so-called developed regions to sites like Mumbai’s peripheries.

What sharpens the exhibition’s charge is its setting within the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, a museum shaped by colonial collecting practices. Vaish situates Altaf’s work in dialogue with these histories, noting that “the venue inevitably shapes how the work is encountered”. The exhibition is positioned within both the museum and the city, where colonial encounters remain embedded in the urban fabric. The inclusion of the museum’s baobab tree, whose origins trace back to Africa, extends this inquiry outdoors. It becomes, in Vaish’s words, “a lens for considering its journey… and the histories of colonial movement”.

Altaf’s long engagement with Adivasi communities in Bastar informs this perspective. There, land is understood as an interdependent ecology, animated by relationships between human and non-human life. Returning to Mumbai’s landfills, the artist encounters a different configuration, where interdependence persists alongside extraction and abandonment. The tension between care and disposability runs through the exhibition, never resolved, only made more visible.

If the works refuse closure, they offer something else: a space in which discomfort can be shared rather than deflected. Altaf does not position herself outside the systems she examines. Instead, her practice acknowledges complicity as a starting point, asking what it means to remain attentive within it. In this sense, the exhibition does less to explain than to hold open a set of questions, each one returning to the same uneasy premise: how the world we discard continues to shape the one we inhabit.

What: Waste Archives as Landscapes

When: 12 March - 10 June 2026

Where: Jehangir Nicholson Art Gallery, CSMVS Museum, Fort, Mumbai

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