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by Preeti Kathuria

Curate — Speculate: Indian Contemporary Art and the Socio-Ecological Contingency

There are a range of art practices that document, address, thematize and/or respond to a matrix of socio-ecological issues. The dyadic relationship between conditions of chronic precarity and its transference into art and its visibility is layered, twisted and inherently complex. Many curatorial interventions are a generative attempt to redress this imbalance and enable meaningful engagement and experiences. However, there are cases when the curative control denatures the individual stances in the process of fine-tuning a collective voice. Are artistic practices and curating adding layers of structure and civility to our understanding of the hinterland, or are they actually creating an awareness about the hinterland surrounded by a hyper-stimulated civilization? A large percentage of India’s population lives in the rural areas and is dependent on agriculture for their livelihood. According to the 2011 census, 69 percent of the population derives its sustenance from farming[1]. Indian agriculture is heavily dependent on the monsoon and the unforeseen vagaries of nature make the farmers extremely vulnerable to debt traps. Climate crisis therefore, is one of the major contributors to agrarian crisis, and adds agency to eco-sustainability issues.

Rooted in regional, topographical and material realities, artists along with curators, serve as connectors and catalysts in voicing matters of socio-ecological contingency. Two recent exhibitions that opened simultaneously in Delhi offered a rather wide and entangled spectrum of artistic practices that were irreverent and interrogative in spirit, but lumbered in their own precautions and excesses––the inherent dilemma of negotiations. The first exhibition Sustaina India––organized by artist duo Thukral & Tagra along with curator Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi––opened at Bikaner House, central Delhi, strategically overlapping with the India Art Fair earlier this year. The exhibition was conceptualized by a sustainability think tank, Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), and stemmed from ‘the urgency to catalyze pollinations across art, science and policy-making. Sustaina India mobilized creators to integrate decentralized climate awareness and sustainability conversations into the cultural fabric of India and beyond’[2]. Hosting artistic interventions of eleven artists the space not only offered immersive, sensory and tactile experiences, but also served itself as a derivative of sustainable solutions to exhibition-making, by employing display panels made from crop-residue, soy-based inks and eco-friendly paints. In the present times, when most contemporary art exhibitions are emblematic of theatricalizing issues of social awareness, the Sustaina India exhibition chose to problematize their own position in relation to material entanglement and uncover potential solutions.



Sustaina India Exhibition, Installation shots, Bikaner House, Delhi, 2024



Sustaina India Exhibition, Installation shots, Bikaner House, Delhi, 2024

Sustaina India Exhibition, Installation shots, Bikaner House, Delhi, 2024

 

With an elaborate spread of horizontal installations, documentary-based artworks, edible archives and climate recipes, the exhibition toggled back and forth to activate purpose, aesthetics, materiality, performance and engagement in good balance. The project Climate Recipes originated in Goa and is based on Srinivas Mangipudi and Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi’s dialogic conversations with environmentalists, historians, academicians, urban planners, architects, poets, chefs, farmers and scientists, to generate new knowledge in the wake of climate adversity. Punctuated with thought-provoking anecdotes such as “we need to bring back the leisure of tea” or “in sustainable architectural practice the termite mound is an invaluable reference, a natural way to keep homes cool” or the “imported daal (lentil) - practices of food consumption and production”[3] were not just ways to sensitize the viewer but also opened points for further research. This compendium of local knowledge became an archive of wisdom that nurtured a gradual shift in pre-existing notions of adaptability to climate change.

Pallav Saikia’s work Rahmaria Archive presented a series of five photographs framed in a bamboo structure, as a documentation of the transition of his village’s landscape as it is gradually getting submerged into the Brahmaputra River. Living with the Land, a sculptural installation by architect Debasmita Ghosh, highlighted the vernacular architectural practices of the Khonds, few remaining Adivasi (tribal) communities of Odisha's Rayagada district. Spatially the exhibition was dominated by a spiraling fabric installation titled Kaalchakra presented by fashion designer Gaurav Jai Gupta. Working at the interstices of craft and technology, Gupta used air pollution residue particles as a colorant for this artwork. Several other artworks came together to present a microcosm of magical possibilities that were a source for reflection and regeneration. The construct of this exhibition established the site as generative of its critical function, where protocols were both reinforced and destabilized in order to amplify agency and alternatives.

At about the same time, Delhi saw another exhibition revolving around a similar theme, hosted by NIV Art Centre titled Mumkin Zameen/Possible Lands. The exhibition was a fruition of a ten-day winter residency awarded to eleven artists to explore the idea of land in context with the Aravalli belt region in south Delhi, amidst the larger discourse of ecological crises and its subsequent socio-political effects. According to the curator Kamayani Sharma, the exhibition builds, “...grounds for hope, which are necessary for us to reorient ourselves along axes of danger. Whether it is the encroachment of adivasi (tribal) jal (water), jangal (forest), jameen (land), the settlement of property disputes in favor of majoritarian actors, the metabolisms of rural-urban ecosystems or the migrations across borderlands within and without, land is the organizing (or disorganizing) principle of life-worlds”.  In this exhibition, two artists from Odisha presented artworks that strongly aligned with the ongoing agrarian crisis ; Bhikari Pradhan’s mixed media installation titled Interdependency was a modernist grid structure built from his childhood memory of a fence meant to protect agricultural land and farms in Odisha, and Sitikanta Samantasinghar work Hidden Areas III questioned and commented upon the unsustainable supply chain of agricultural material. Both installations had a strong defining presence like the realistic figurines of farm families in Pradhan’s work, and sickles hanging above a questionable patch of land symbolizing peasant movements, migration and how land gets detached from its roots and original soil, in the work of Samantasinghar.



Mumkin Zameen/Possible Lands. The exhibition, Installation shots, NIV Arts Centre, Delhi, 2024



Mumkin Zameen/Possible Lands. The exhibition, Installation shots, NIV Arts Centre, Delhi, 2024

Mumkin Zameen/Possible Lands. The exhibition, Installation shots, NIV Arts Centre, Delhi, 2024

 

Three more artists could be integrated into the premise but with sufficient aesthetic contemplation of inherent differences. Inspired by the farming culture of her native town in Tripura, artist Gopa Roy employed a variety of natural material like straw pulp, jute, thread, tree bark and rice paper to depict the dichotomy of her rural roots against the urban sprawl of Delhi. Preksha Golchha’s interactive installation mediated between sound and image, bringing awareness  upon displacement and encroachment of village land in the name of development. She used patched jute suspensions along with the sounds of a bustling neighborhood to recreate a multi-sensory experience for the visitor. Sapna Kuniyal created a series of two paintings titled Pungad (Garhwali word meaning ‘farming land’), reflecting upon the agricultural anthropology of her native state Uttarakhand. The paintings encased an asymmetric pattern of farming tools and circular breads showing the microcosm of the farming community that grows for all and feeds unconditionally. An uncanny coexistence of six more artists in this exhibition highlighted their individual, deep rooted entanglements with land, in synchronicity with the spirit of the master narrative of the show.

The premise of building an exhibition through a relational framework of engagement and exchange in a residency can privilege tactile conversations and connections. For a viewer, the exhibition format could not embrace and deliver these connections and only fulfilled its curricular role of display. On critical reflection, one may argue that the exhibition situated itself in a paradoxical space which hovered between a thematic exhibition and the presentation of geographically diverse positions of artists who are not very visible in Delhi. Even though the artworks were intrinsically charged, their coming together did not clearly expose those inherent tensions. Conceptually the exhibition was suggestive of civic engagement but the actual parameters of exchange were rather delusional. The artists and the exhibition held together the national with the subjective local in a seamless stance, nevertheless coping with constraint and collaboration, nostalgia and conservative radicality all in the same vein. The exhibition, lined with social advocacy, built up questions which were of wider significance than mere whispers of terrestriality pan-India.

Through dialogue with fine art, film, literature and fashion, the contributions here draw attention to the power relations implicated in and upset by claims of visibility. They show how visual culture and cultural industries are today complicated by geopolitics of location and mobility, inscribed with tensions between knowledge and perception.[4]

Taking a cue from Zeena Feldman’s engaging writing on the theme of visibility, it is essential to say that seeing something is different from knowing it, especially when the contemporary art arena serves raking diagonals and dense cross-hatches of meaning. Bringing art, film, literature and fashion together, visual art exhibitions emerge as collaborative spaces but should they always assimilate and homogenize a singular narrative as a sanitized projection? Or maybe one should ask - how should an exhibition responsibly handle diversity without endangering its purpose? The two exhibitions discussed here are distinct curatorial models that in their own curative-speculative ways were embedded in reappraising an optimistic stance in an unfavorable ecological reality. Both the shows had a fairly similar spatial and temporal expanse, similar number of artists, same city, but the reach and resonance were distinct. These two containers of contemporary visual culture were two ideational possibilities of positioning a cause and bringing presence to what is absent.

 

Preeti Kathuria is a writer, curator and an educator currently pursuing her PhD in History of Art, at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria. She holds post-graduate degrees in History of Art from the National Museum Institute, New Delhi and in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London as a Charles Wallace India Trust Scholar. She has worked as Assistant Editor, Contemporary Art, with the Lalit Kala Akademi (National Academy of Art), New Delhi, and has been writing on contemporary art for various art journals and magazines. Besides critical writing and editorial work, she has taught visual art at several universities and colleges in India. She has presented her research work at Global New Voices 2024, Association for Art History, UK, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, University of Toronto, Canada, die Angewandte, Vienna, and Tranzit Iasi, Romania, in recent years.


Notes

[1] Athreya, Venkatesh B, R V Bhavani, A Narayanamoorthy, R Sujatha, and M.S Swaminathan. Whither Rural India: Political Economy of Agrarian Transformation in Contemporary India: A Festschrift for Venkatesh B. Athreya. New Delhi, India: Tulika Books, 2019.

[2] Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, Thukral and Tagra, Sustaina India, New Delhi, India 2024.

[3] Srinivas Mangipudi, Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, Climate Recipes. Goa, India 2023

[4] Zeena Feldman, Art and the Politics of Visibility: Contesting the Global, Local and the in-Between. (London: 2017), p.3.

 

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