'Our Conspiring Hosts: Of Rivers, Vines, and Microbes' (exhibition view). Courtesy: Anant Art.
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Our Conspiring Hosts: Of Rivers, Vines, and Microbes
Curated by: Adwait Singh
Artists: Bhimanshu Pandel, Devadeep Gupta, Garima Gupta, Imaad Majeed, Karan Shrestha, Maksud Ali Mondal, Paribartana Mohanty, Salman B. Baba, Sonia Mehra Chawla, Temsuyanger Longkumer
Exhibition dates: 28 March – 8 April 2024
Presented by Anant Art at Bikaner House, New Delhi
The idiom ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea’ situates our city particularly well. Where the devil incarnates as an invasive tree from south and central America, Prosopis juliflora which was first introduced by the colonial authorities to the hilly tracts of the Central Ridge around 1915. The hardy mesquite has since spread like a scourge through the city forests, smothering native species and defying any attempts by current authorities to check its vengeful growth. Its tenacity and reproductive vigour have earned it sobriquets like baavlia or the mad tree elsewhere in the country. On the other hand, the Delhi version of the deep blue sea would point to the darkly slithering Yamuna along the city’s eastern edge. When the British decided to move the imperial capital from Kolkata to Delhi in 1911, they picked the area between these two flanks—the recalcitrant Ridge to the west and the unpredictable river to the east—to establish the seat of their government. Hoping to turn the overgrazed Central Ridge into an amenity forest for the newly proposed Viceregal Palace (presently the Rashtrapati Bhavan), they tried to coax a variety of flora to take to its acidic soils, mostly in vain. In fact, accounts of their trial and error in pursuit of the Ridge’s rejuvenation can furnish enough material to weave a tale worthy of that queer subgenre of Victorian fantasy literature, the botanical gothic with its groundings in colonial fears of foreign environments. The climax of such a plot would doubtless unfurl a diorama with the colonisers caught between the hammer of maddened mesquites, advancing down the Ridge (like the ominous Birnam Wood from Macbeth) to avenge the jackal genocide conducted in the name of the viceroy and his wife who abhorred their howling, and the anvil of a raging river. Can you picture it?
While colonial laments about not-quite-human agencies conspiring against the empire have not gone entirely unregistered, it is the post-colonial legacy of their beliefs, attitudes, and fears of the worlds colonised that bears further scrutiny. For we have accepted uncritically and unreservedly certain notions of hierarchy, competition, and selection, as well as the resulting exceptionalism as natural. Unsurprisingly then, these unwitting inheritances remain haunted by a taxonomical terror—a lurking apprehension that the silenced, the backgrounded, and the subdued would one day refuse their assigned places in the order of things, leaving the supremacist and speciesist pyramid on shaky grounds. Indeed, as the background around us erupts insistently and indiscriminately these lurking fears are becoming ever harder to ignore. What thrillers does our disquieted background dictate?
In an era dubbed as the ‘Anthropocene’—a coinage meant to underscore the disproportionate human hand behind recent catastrophic biospheric shifts—it is no longer tenable to keep fuelling the fiction of humanity as discreet from its surroundings, of the world being a garden that we’re divinely (or should we say Darwin-ly?) entitled to ravage with impunity. Through its engagements of the eerie lurking at the periphery of our vision, the exhibition seeks to bring attention to other-than-human agencies and vitalisms that animate our environs, half-known phenomena of which ‘we’ are an inextricable part. In other words, the defamiliarising gaze trained by the exhibition exposes our sanitised worlds as foldings of the contagious outside, leaving the human shivering in all his porous vulnerability, unholy origins and impure constitution. Ecological horror would then appear to stem not only from ponderings of alien motivations at large that are indifferent to our own but also from the revelation of our own motivations as inherently alien. These considerations of the natural weird are thus calculated to confront us with the weird within our natures. How does our ecological awareness shift when we can no longer rely on notions of familiarity and nurture in our framings of ‘nature’? What kind of relationality and ‘humanity’ is cobbled together in the face of a hostile host? Can horror be used to expand our comprehension of causality, enabling better responses to catastrophe and the processing of ecological existentialism? These are possible lines of inquiry that the exhibition illuminates.
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The contents of ‘Our Conspiring Hosts’ are organised under three broad metonyms: rivers, vines, and microbes. ‘Rivers’ loosely collates the works of five artists. Garima Gupta’s drawings conjoin the childhood memories of flooding in the low-lying areas of ‘Jamna-paar’ (in Delhi), where the artist’s family relocated some 40 years ago, to the fleeting impressions from a recent crossing of the Amazon in flood. Here the river features as a brooding backdrop against which various object-subject dynamics are irradiated momentarily before being perfunctorily engulfed, disrupted, and equalised. Paribartana Mohanty’s speculative documentary Ocean Mud Pickle employs the Odia folk theatre format of Daskathia to narrativise the climate exigencies afflicting the coastal regions of his native Odisha, culminating in the slipping of Satabhaya fishing village under the Bay of Bengal. The accompanying lenticular prints marking the loss and transits of the affected communities ghost the viewer’s passage. Salman B. Baba’s performance prints invoke water and other hauntological agencies sleeping deeply within ancient alluvial mounds known as ‘karewas’ (hill) that watch over Srinagar. Their fertile soils on which many district households rely for livelihood in the form of saffron, apple, and almond cultivation, have in recent years witnessed wonton extraction for large-scale infrastructural constructions. The shift in land use would seem to stir these sleeping spectres, inviting terrible visitations such as the flooding of Srinagar in 2014. In a similar vein, Devadeep Gupta’s Normalisation of a Disaster records the eruption of Furies from the chthonic depths of the Baghjan Oil Field in his native Assam on 27 May 2020. The macabre theatre of the blowout that continued to burn for 173 days captured from different vantages, relates our position to that of a moth hurtling heedlessly towards its fiery fate. Imaad Majeed’s poetry film similarly cites the flaming spectacle of the X-Press Pearl freighter that sank off the coast of Colombo in 2021, discharging tons of nitric acid, oil, and nurdles into the sea. The work relates this ecological disaster—evidently the worst in Sri Lankan history—to other toxicities bedevilling the postwar landscapes of the island that the poet calls home.
The section ‘Vines’ comprises three artists. Karan Shrestha’s presentation is anchored around another monstrous flora from Central, and South America, Mikania micrantha that has voraciously colonised vast swathes of the Chitwan National Park in Nepal. Derogatorily hailed as ‘mile-a-minute’ or ‘banmara,’ the accursed creeper has been known to suffocate native flora, impede wildlife movement, and disrupt the local community’ access to forage in the buffer zones. Just like in Imaad’s poetry film, the vengeful visitant in Karan’s work betokens other possessing presences such as the military. Bhimanshu Pandel’s work communes with opium poppy that is ceremonially consumed by certain rural communities in his native Nagaur (in Rajasthan) to pitch the viewer into hallucinogenic post-agrarian futures. Temsuyanger Longkumer’s terracotta sculpture belongs to a long tradition of human-plant metamorphosis stories. Running counter to humanistic politics with its differential accordance of life and legal personhood, Refuge I collapses the boundary that separates beings from each other and the world, calling for an ecosystemic self. Finally, we have the section ‘microbes’ represented by two artists. Maksud Ali Mondal’s Biotope cannibalises the notion of heterotopia proposed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault to upend our own abject perceptions of and responses to the microscopic. The thread is picked up by Sonia Mehra Chawla’s Symbiotic Self series that exposes the human as a menagerie of microorganisms (up to 90% of cells in our bodies are non-human with 99% of our genome being bacterial) colluding imperceptibly with each other as well as with the biosphere. Drawing on the works of American evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, and animal physiologist and biochemist Margaret McFall-Ngai, Sonia’s multipart project offers insights into what it means to be human in the Anthropocene, expressing our struggle for survival in contingent and collaborative terms.
'Our Conspiring Hosts: Of Rivers, Vines, and Microbes' (exhibition views). Courtesy: Anant Art.
'Our Conspiring Hosts: Of Rivers, Vines, and Microbes' (exhibition views). Courtesy: Anant Art.