“I think of my life’s work as a celebration of all of nature, an orchestra that plays not the sounds of one musician, the music of one species, but rather an expression of all of nature’s songs.”

— Gregory Colbert

This Land is Your Land, curated by Imran Qureshi, takes its title from a poem by Woody Guthrie signifying the message that we (including wildlife) are all equally entitled to the land we stand on. The exhibition features work by Elisa Caldana and Kamran Saleem that addresses a shared desire for all species to participate in a universal conversation and sees nature as the greatest storyteller of all.

Elisa Caldana, born in 1986, is an Italian artist working primarily with sculpture, performance, film and writing. She graduated from Städelschule Frankfurt, and the University of Venice, and has shown internationally at The Hague, Amsterdam, Rome, Bologna, Turin, London, Mexico City, Tokyo and Frankfurt-am-Main. She is an alumna of Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, and a recipient of the Mondrian Fund.

The Falcon of Karachi, comprising a video projection and a soundscape, was produced with Luisa Puterman (composer) and Zeerak Ahmed (vocalist) in collaboration with Vasl Artists’ Association in Karachi - where she had been an artist-in-residence (2024).

The video piece “explores the identity of a laggar falcon,” taken captive in Malir and tied to a charpoy. The audio piece originated “as an attempt at imagining a sound identity for the bird... without words.”

Falconry is one of the oldest known human activities, dating back millennia to before the existence of written history. Whether it is practised for survival, for sport, or as a way of honouring the past, it continues to evolve. Over centuries, this practice spread outward from the Middle East along the Silk Route and evolved from sustenance hunting into royal recreation becoming a sport of kings.

Falcons are threatened by a dangerous combination of habitat loss, increasing scarcity of prey, and other factors, from changing land use and deforestation to climate change. One has to connect with and understand the environment to understand the natural capabilities of the falcon.

A conversation with an animal begins by watching gestures and reading facial cues. It is a non-verbal conversation. You do not think of a falcon; you try to feel it. Such is the invocation in Elisa Caldana’s video art. She creates a climate of trust that opens the way for spontaneous interaction with the captive falcon. You cannot chart its course, dictate its wanderings, direct its gestures or choreograph its flight.

Our perception of nature is often human-centric. Caldana is looking at the world through the eye of the falcon when the falcon, blindfolded in a leather hood, cannot see. Some are illegally taken or captured from the wild each year for use in falconry, in which people train the raptors to help them hunt or as a decoy. They are a vulnerable species, facing a challenge they cannot flee. The sport has doomed it to exploitation.

It’s not at all easy to approach falcons sufficiently close to frame as has been done without spooking them, or worse, being attacked.

Falcons are threatened by a dangerous combination of habitat loss, increasing scarcity of prey, and other factors from changing land use and deforestation to climate change. One has to connect with and understand the environment to understand the natural capabilities of the falcon.

Regardless of the medium and method, the pictorial result is stunning: the video footage has the right degree of organic softness to convey emotion. At the same time, there’s a deep richness to the tones that makes both subject and image ageless. Viewing the falcon, one feels as though one is peering into another time and world; there are moments where the intensity of gaze makes it feel as though one is being monitored and not the other way around.

The sound piece, like a whale song, is the last wild voice calling to the consciousness of terminally civilised humanity, our last contact with nature before we submerge forever in our own manufacture and lose forever the final fragments of our wild selves.

Kamran Saleem is a wildlife filmmaker. His documentary Deosai – The Last Sanctuary won the prize for protection of nature at the Ménigoute Film Festival in France. His books, including Birds of Sialkot and Land of Rhyming Cliffs are celebrated. The series of images presented in the show focus on a herd of deer in the wild threatened with extinction, forced displacement exile and emigration. Proprietorship and possession of land by human beings have led to their dwindling population and migration.

The power of Saleem’s images comes less from their formal beauty than from the way they envelop the viewer in their mood. Artists in all creative disciplines try to inspire a transformation and offer a non-hierarchical vision of the natural world, one that celebrates the whole of nature’s orchestra. Just at the moment, we are burning down what remains of nature’s living library; Saleem is creating an intangible library of the wonder of the world of deer that reminds us of what is being lost. The aborigines were probably exploring the same enchantment when they painted animals – they were not merely interested in painting their contours but focused equally on the animal’s dream life.

What does a flock of deer look like in its domain? Saleem’s photos provide an unprecedented glimpse of deer in their natural habitat. The images have an intensity and awareness that reminds one that wild creatures have a vastly different perspective than humans.

The biggest threat to the natural world is the encroachment on the remaining natural wilderness by humans and their out-of-control development, animals being wiped out in the rapidly decreasing number of places they can live in. What you see in these photos is what has happened, is happening and will continue to happen in a frighteningly short number of years.

Saleem eschews traditional ‘reality’ wildlife photography for a style that’s much closer to classical portraiture; his deer subjects take on intimate, emotional, very human qualities. All of his subjects are wild and of course unposed.

This Land is Your Land is not so much reportage as the conveying of an idea and the desperation and hopelessness one feels for the animals and the people trying to protect them. These images return us to the sanity of our undeniable, unavoidable, inextricable connection to nature. And they do so with beauty, grace, lightness and strength.

The writer is an art critic based in Islamabad