Bangladeshi artist Soma Surovi Jannat has opened her first UK exhibition, 'Climate Culture Care,' at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The show features around 20 paintings and drawings created largely during a 2023 residency, drawing inspiration from the endangered Sundarbans mangrove forest and the museum's own collections. Her works fuse human, animal, and mythological imagery to depict the region's ecological and social struggles.
The exhibition is significant as the first solo museum show in the UK for a Bangladesh-based artist, directly linking climate activism with art. It highlights the acute vulnerability of Bangladesh to climate change, using the Sundarbans—a critical carbon sink and storm barrier now threatened by rising seas—as a central metaphor. Jannat's work connects historical artifacts with contemporary crisis, emphasizing the intertwined fates of culture, people, and a disappearing ecosystem.