Fragile Kinships

Commissioned by The Embassy of Switzerland in New Delhi

Featuring works by Himali Singh Soin, Parag Tandel, Sonia Mehra Chawla and Varun Narain

1 - 3 February 2019, New Delhi

Anthropocene, one of the buzzwords of the twenty-first century, has rapidly gained currency in the past few years, moving dangerously close to the realm of overuse. The idea, popularised in 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, is proposed as the successor to the Holocene which began 11,700 years ago, after the last ice age. While debates on the validity of the new terminology go on, one of the useful facets of the term (possibly one of the only few currently) lies in its structural formulation, acting a pointer to consider the grand centrality of humans - anthropos - in all our perceptions of the world. Thinking forward from this postulation, and thinking through the ecological and geopolitical crises we find ourselves in, what effects does the centrality of the self have on the integrity of our kinships?

New ways of living require new ways of seeing, of knowing, and of being with one another. Donna Haraway throws open multi-species companion thinking in her wet, porous, muddy and mundane imagination of the Chthulucene - Greek chthonios, meaning “of, in, or under the earth and the seas.” Through her writings over many years, she urges us not to think of, but to think with the diverse range of critters we share the earth and the seas with. This kind of thinking is also embodied in The Last Jungle on Earth a post-war story by Randhir Khare. Through his motley group of species, ranging from Elephants, to an owl, a jackal and a mind-reading dodo, journeying together to revive the Mother Tree, Khare explores the labour needed to form trust and friendships as we look to build greener futures. In this current exhibition, contemporary puppeteer Varun Narain shifts ground beneath the myth of the all-knowing human by bringing in two unlikely companions, the emanations of Theobroma Cacao and Zingiber Officinale. Our sassy hosts, otherwise known to fans as Cocoa and Ginger, bicker and banter their way through an inter-generational entanglement they find themselves, and us, in.

Flirting unbiasedly with both science and imagination, our polyphonic journey stretches across spatial and temporal landscapes, reaching no certain conclusions. Sonia Mehra Chawla zooms in to scale out, smuggling in evidence from biology experiments. Her examination of transgenic processes throws light on the complexities of human interventions in evolutionary rhythms. Is Science donning the role of Creator in this religion called Progress? As we find ourselves in the midst of climatic catastrophe (certified Urgent! by UN IPCC) inching closer to planetary shifts such as ice-free Arctic summers, Himali Singh Soin introduces an alien form into the frozen landscape, attempting to collapse polarities and fracture artificial boundaries. The melting ice will see no walls, and no visa barriers.

Alien mourns the loss of elemental knowledge reservoirs in their celebration of stoic glacial beauty. Are there mythologies to be found in geographies that humans don't call home? Perhaps they can see beyond our civilised viewing abilities, "the word belief, contains in it the word lie." Beliefs, their contaminations, and their afterlives, occupy a new sculptural series by

Parag Tandel. While offering traditional non-anthropocentric deities from his Koli community, Parag obscures them with the 'pan-Indian' evil eye of nimbu-mirchi. These hybrid structures hold within them the residue of cultural vanquish, slowly creeping, coercing homogeneity.

If you too feel the limitations of living in this physicality, let's build a fire and whisper the things we've lost in our motions of choreographed individuality. Strange kin may be our only hope to survive in the face of our fragility.

(Shaunak Mahbubani, 2019)

SONIA MEHRA CHAWLA
Moving Inwards
Single Channel High Definition Video Loop

VARUN NARAIN
Not so strange in the Age of Climate Change
Mixed Media Puppets, Variable Dimensions, 2019

Although considered insentient by the human world- there is ample scientific proof that Plants have emotions and a very elaborate communication system. When one is open to percieving without judging, one can hear the stories that plants tell. Contemporary puppeteer Varun Narain, brings to life two floral queens: Theobroma Cacao - the plant that bears the cocoa bean from which ultimately cocoa is derived, and Zingiber Officinale aka Ginger. The artist, also trained as a botanist, bases his creations on the botanical structures of the actual plants, embellishing them then further with flair, sass, movement and speech. Both Cocoa and Ginger bring out their strong flavours and thus, dominant personalities. Not given the attention they deserve, they strut around with attitude arguing with each other. Their queer relationship/s have given rise to some transgenic offsprings, was it those meddling humans again?!

SONIA MEHRA CHAWLA
Universe in Details
In-lit Photographs, 2019

Part of Sonia Mehra Chawla's continued engagement with Mangrove ecologies, these photographs of microbial cultures provide an astute starting point to consider the necessary entwinement and entanglement of humans and our other-than-human kin. These otherwise invisible critters, which contribute to the bio-geochemical cycles in one of the most important ecosystems in the search for climatic resuscitation, have been prepared at the MSSRF laboratories and were documented by the artist in the laboratory's UV laminar flow cabinets to prevent contamination of experiment.
In this act of zooming up close, the artist also gives us a way to look far above, destabilising our own positions in the complex nexus of multi-species living. Interstellar and interstitial both, the images urge us to practice holding multiplicities.

SONIA MEHRA CHAWLA
The Salt Lab: (Under) Currents and Crosswinds
Photographs with Inscriptions, 2018-19

Climate change brings a new urgency to understanding salt tolerance and the impact of various abiotic stresses on food crops in India. Of all the monocots, rice is the most sensitive to salinity. Rice is the world’s most important staple food. Through its various ongoing phases of research and documentation, the body of work reflects on the urgency to develop salt-tolerant and drought-resistant food crops in India. The project explores both indigenous saline tolerant rice varieties in India, as well as recent developments in the field of biotechnology for transgenic rice (from mangrove species), technologies that may shape the future of food in India.

PARAG TANDEL
Colour-Blind
Polyester thread, cotton thread, and stainless steel, Variable Dimensions, 2019

Drawing from the changing culture of his Koli village, assimilated over time into the megacity of Mumbai, Parag Tandel creates intricate sculptures in seven hues. The armature, inspired by traditional non-representational mother goddess deities, is populated with references to the nimbu-mirchi (lemon-chilli) evil eye believed to be a ward against ill-will and misfortune in the Indian region. This hybrid iconography offers a multi-pronged approach to think about divisive ideologies, majoritarian cultural influences, and fading indigenous wisdoms. The artist also adds other symbologies such as the colours of prominent sacred pigments, and the soul-stone carrying boats, reclaiming contemporary artistic space for the assertion of marginalized knowledges.

Performance Walkthrough by Shaunak Mahbubani and Varun Narain

Past / Future Lab - An interactive curatorial intervention

HIMALI SINGH SOIN
we are opposites like that: South Asian Futurism
1/7 Channel Video, 08:38 min, 2019

Building up non-anthropocentric, post-human ways of storytelling, artist Himali Singh Soin forages for polar mythologies that compose her series 'we are opposites like that'. This new video from the series, shot during a research residency on Svalbard in the high Arctic circle, captures the attenuation of planetary temporalities, confined geographies and decolonial possibilities through the motions of an alien figure entangled in a shifting landscape of receding glaciers. we are opposite like that desires to rearrange the map, and while firmly located in the two polar circles, it proposes a kind of transnationalist world blanketed in lichen and in which north and south are collapsed. Since the poles are used as laboratories for outer space research and have been the site of high frequency UFO sightings, Soin uses sci-fi tropes to propose a south-asian futurism, in which rationalism and the occult claim a multiplicity of disparate narratives, unified only by strange teleconnections.

Credits: Ikroop Sandhu (Animation), Devra Freelander (Field support) Supported by: The Embassy of Switzerland in India and India Foundation for the Arts