The 2023 exhibition Silent Conversation: From Margins to the Centre marked 50 years of Project Tiger through artwork by tribal and forest-dwelling communities.
Presented at India Habitat Centre in New Delhi, the exhibition was organised by the National Tiger Conservation Authority with the Sankala Foundation.
Conservation seen through people living near reserves
Project Tiger began in 1973 to protect Bengal tigers and restore their habitats.
By 2023, India had expanded the network to 54 tiger reserves.
The exhibition shifted attention from official conservation statistics toward communities whose lives were directly connected with forests and wildlife.
Artists from Gond, Bhil and other traditions used visual language developed through long relationships with animals, plants, seasonal cycles and local landscapes.
Art moving from the margins into national display
The title described an effort to place Indigenous and forest-based knowledge at the centre of environmental discussion.
Rather than presenting these communities only as people affected by conservation policy, the exhibition recognised them as interpreters of the ecosystems in which they lived.
Painting became a record of bonds between human life, tiger habitat and the wider forest.
The original article included substantial ceremonial and institutional detail but did not identify individual artists or works.
The exhibition’s curatorial purpose nevertheless remains clear.
Silent Conversation argued that wildlife conservation cannot be understood only through protected boundaries and animal counts.
It also depends on cultural knowledge, livelihoods and the visual traditions of communities whose presence in the forest predates modern conservation programmes.