Ashmolean Museum Spotlights Bangladesh’s Climate Reality in Soma Surovi Jannat’s UK Debut
Oxford is not a place most visitors associate with rising seas, yet a new exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum asks viewers to picture a coastline that is already slipping away. “Climate Culture Care,” a solo presentation by Dhaka-born artist Soma Surovi Jannat, brings Bangladesh’s environmental precarity into the galleries through a dense, allegorical language of mangroves, myth, and bodies.
The show is a milestone on two fronts: it is Surovi’s first exhibition in the UK and, according to the museum, the first solo exhibition of a Bangladesh-based artist to be mounted by a UK museum. It features around 40 paintings and drawings, many made following Surovi’s residency at the Ashmolean during the summer of 2023. One work was executed directly onto the museum’s walls.
The exhibition’s urgency is grounded in hard numbers. Research cited from John Hopkins University projects that by 2050 rising sea levels could submerge 17% of Bangladesh’s territory and 30% of its agricultural land. The stakes are amplified by the country’s population density and by the frequently noted imbalance between Bangladesh’s minute contribution to global emissions and the outsized consequences it faces.
Surovi’s primary point of departure is the Sundarbans, the sprawling mangrove region shared between India and the south of Bangladesh. Often described as the world’s largest contiguous mangrove forest, it is threaded by river systems and known for its biodiversity, including the endangered Bengal tiger. It is also home to more than 13 million people living within a World Heritage Site increasingly pressured by environmental degradation and climate change. Rising seas and land salinisation pose particular risks to the Sundari mangrove trees that dominate the region — a species long valued for its storm-buffering root systems and for its capacity to sequester carbon.
Rather than illustrating these conditions literally, Surovi builds a dreamlike iconography in which human and animal forms mingle, distort, and sometimes fuse. Across the exhibition, the flora and fauna of the Sundarbans collide with stories and cultural traditions, producing scenes that feel at once celebratory and unsettled.
A key example is “Where Every Leaf Holds a Tale” (2023–24), a series of eight ink and acrylic works on paper. Each sheet takes the outline of one of the Sundarbans’ islands and sand bars, echoing an archipelago understood to be shrinking under climatic pressure. Within these island-shaped silhouettes, local creatures — from tigers to turtles, storks, and shrimps — form strange alliances with folkloric and religious figures. Bonbibi, the region’s principal forest deity, appears alongside humans and gods from the Hindu pantheon, turning the paper’s surface into a crowded stage where ecology and belief are inseparable.
The Ashmolean’s own collections are not treated as background material but as active interlocutors. Surovi’s close study of the museum’s holdings — particularly works connected to Asia and the Indian subcontinent — feeds directly into her imagery. In one pointed transformation, a terracotta plaque of a Yakshi (a nature spirit) from the second century BC is reimagined as a monumental, heavily pregnant Mother Nature figure. The body becomes a site of contradiction: she cradles a lifeless bird between her breasts, a mangrove shoot rises from her navel, and a roaring tiger is forced into the composition with visceral force.
Another work, “Resensitizing the Brown Narrative” (2023), draws on the Ashmolean’s collection of 19th-century unfired clay caste models, using that material history to address how skin color, caste, and social status are read and enforced. In the context of “Climate Culture Care,” these questions of hierarchy and vulnerability sit alongside the exhibition’s environmental themes, underscoring how natural disasters and social inequalities often intensify one another.
Taken together, Surovi’s works propose the Sundarbans not only as a threatened landscape but as a living archive — of labor, worship, survival, and the uneasy bargains people make with water. At the Ashmolean, that archive is reframed through museum objects and contemporary painting, asking what it means to look at climate crisis through culture, and to recognize resilience without romanticizing the conditions that demand it.
