Our Conspiring Hosts: Of Rivers, Vines, and Microbes: Curated by Adwait Singh

The group show is curated by Adwait Singh, featuring the works of Bhimanshu Pandel, Devadeep Gupta, Garima Gupta, Imaad Majeed, Karan Shrestha, Maksud Ali Mondal, Paribartana Mohanty, Salman Bashir, Sonia Mehra Chawla and Temsuyanger Longkumer. 

The exhibition courts the eco-horror genre with its formulations of weird natural phenomena teasing the borders of the human. In an epoch dubbed the ‘Anthropocene’ that points to the overlarge human footprint behind rampant biospheric shifts, the speculative genre of eco-horror opens a fundamental line of inquiry into what it means to be human today. It questions the damaging fiction of humanity that has alienated itself from the world, turning on its host like a parasite, or a tumour. The defamiliarising gaze trained by the exhibition exposes the human in all his vulnerable porosity that makes him continuous with the surrounding world—open to all kinds of invasions and an unwitting host to alien colonies. Viewed in this light, horror would seem as much a product of contemplation of queer ecologies as of revelation of otherness as always already within. 

The contents of the exhibition 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 possesing 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.