The Chittagong Hill Tracts in south-eastern Bangladesh are home to 11 different Jumma, or indigenous peoples. Their connection to their lands, as guardians of the natural environment, is the focus of Joydeb Roaja’s practice. The artist belongs to the Tripura community, and his multidisciplinary work, while dominated by distinctive figurative paintings, intersects with his practice as a performance artist. Roaja has become a powerful and poetic voice expressing his peoples’ symbiotic relationships to nature and the fraught history of land and human rights in the region.

In the mid twentieth century, around 90 per cent of the Chittagong Hill Tracts population was indigenous; now, after decades of moving ‘settlers’ into the region, only approximately half the population is indigenous. ‘The future of indigenous peoples’ 2024 series addresses this eviction from traditional lands and the entailing loss of villages and culture, and is particularly inspired by Roaja’s witnessing of non-indigenous people filming and interrupting traditional ceremonial practices. In these unplanned compositions, towering Jumma figures morph with nature, as ant-like groups of settlers, tourists and the media gather at their feet and helicopters and drones swarm above. For Roaja, his people, culture and land are not only the subject he is dedicated to safeguarding into the future, but also a source of intangible power.