The Ecology of a Crisis

How do artists respond to environmental degradation, damage and disaster? Lajja Shah visits a group show that addresses the catastrophe staring us in the face.

- Lajja Shah

"All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born." This emphatic refrain from the elegiac poem Easter, 1916, by W. B. Yeats recalls a revolutionary event in Ireland's struggle for independence. In New Natures: A Terrible Beauty is Born, curator Ravi Agarwal reconfigures the unsettling sense of urgency and uncertainty encoded within the prescient lines written over a century ago to draw attention to the pressing issue of our times: the escalating ecological crisis.

The exhibition brings together 17 artists, including Navjot Altaf, Ranbir Kaleka, and Ishan Tankha, among others, whose multivalent works across a spectrum of artistic practices and positions collectively reflect on questions of nature "to unearth relationships which form identity, language, politics, livelihoods, and worldviews." On view from the 3rd of February to the 15th of April at Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan (MMB), Mumbai, the display, spread over the Natural History Section and lawns of the Children's Museum at the adjoining Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), makes for an expansive, if somewhat disconnected viewing experience. The show is an iteration of State of Nature, a project initiated by MMB in 2018 to address and interpret the present ecological crisis.

In New Natures, artists engage mediums and materials in innovative ways. Mining their lived experiences or drawing upon reportage, archive, documentary, fictive and speculative modes, they bring to the fore the socioeconomic, political, and cultural conditions that have propelled us to the brink of the climate catastrophe. Marked by conceptual rigour and an affective depth, the works probe beneath the surficial excesses wrought by the exploitative processes of colonization, industrialization, and the accelerated pace of technological advances to uncover compelling micro-narratives that are often wilfully suppressed, ignored, or lost in the grand agenda of development.