Listening Session

Join us for a special listening session that centers around the original two-hour musical score created for our latest exhibition, Paper Gardens: Art, Botany and Empire 

The musical score was created on commission by Rohan Kale and Udai Sharma. A blend of field recordings from forests, gardens, and natural habitats across the country, were arranged with digitally produced instrumentation. 

Botanical illustrations— made on stark white backgrounds — tend to isolate a plant from its environment and ecological relationships. Through careful layering and spatial design, this score evokes the textures, rhythms, and seasonal transformations that suffuse the ecosystems that plants inhabit. It brings together recordings from forests, gardens, and natural habitats across the country, alongside digitally produced instrumentation. 

The session will begin with a behind-the-scenes walkthrough of the artists’ recording and composition process: how they sourced specific botanical sounds, their experiments with timbre and tone, and the challenges of translating ecological context into sonic experience. This will be followed by a listening session within the gallery space, surrounded by the artworks, offering participants a chance to experience how sound interacts with visual art and ambient space to shape memory, emotion, and perception.

Whether you’re a musician, listener, artist, botanist, or curious visitor, we welcome you to sit with us—and the plants—as the air comes alive with the sound of life unfolding in nature.