In her retrospective presentation of Navjot Altaf’s career, curator Nancy Adajania refrained from using chronology to organize the artist’s five decades of work. Instead, she traced patterns across the breadth of Altaf’s oeuvre, bringing together the artist’s varied preoccupations—from environmental destruction, intercommunal conflict, and disenfranchisement of the working class to discrimination against women and queer communities—to underline their interconnectedness in the rise of fascism in India today.

In the exhibition “The Earth’s Heart, Torn Out,” we met an artist who, while conscious of