The installation To Whom the Bird Should Speak? is a visual enquiry into the significance of language as a medium of communication. Pushkale’s artistic research into indigenous cultures was inspired by the story of the Aka-Bo tribe in the Andaman Islands and their oral tradition of communicating with birds that was lost to the world after the death of its last speaker, Boa Sr. As a contemporary artist and an abstract painter, Pushkale works at the intersection of linguistics and archaeology in an immersive 125 square metres of hand-painted installation, as he imagines a visual ‘script’ of a lost history that we would like to recover, or should it be allowed to fade inexorably into oblivion? Claire Bettinelli is in-charge of exhibition production and the contemporary collections at the National Museum of Asian Arts-Guimet. She curates the Carte blanche exhibitions and a number of modern and contemporary projects and contributes to publications on these subjects.