Two things can be true at once.
A library grows in a forest in Norway. In the year 2114, wood from a thousand saplings there will be used to make paper to print an anthology of a hundred books that, till then, will remain unseen. The forest’s caretakers are optimistic about their living time capsule––an enduring record that exemplifies a basic faith in our continuity.
Earlier in the year 2021, two hundred scientists from across the world signed their names against a climate report, declaring what the United Nations called “code red for humanity.” The situation is dire, it says, but it is yet unclear who is to blame. The report mentions some variation of the phrase “human activity” or “human influence” over thirty times in its first ten pages. The word “fossil fuel” first appears on page fifty-three.
A warming Earth both strains and confirms our collectivity. We are, on the one hand, individual actors, polluters, custodians, and mourners of private tragedies. But equally, we are also a unified and unlikely humanity, at large and at risk. The impressions of our lives are simultaneously our own and each other’s, and they chart a future of weakening possibilities. The end of the world, we now understand, is partly a game of perception. How, then, to see better, more closely, and with greater intention? At the heart of the eleven works displayed here are some uneasy contradictions, between our individual motives and collective responsibilities, our injured histories and living ecologies, the clutter of language and the contained mass of object, image, colour. Each artist––through rearrangement, juxtaposition, material intervention, and irony––offers us a new perspective on how to think through, and beyond, these contradictions.
Text by
Varun Nayar
The Artist Group ;
Baiju Parthan | G R Irana | Khalil Chishtee | Riyas Komu
Vibha Galhotra | Jagannath Panda | Abhimanue Govindan
Vivek VilasiniI Ravi Agarwal | Veer Munshi