We are in an epoch of our own making. The Age of Man: the Anthropocene. Humanity now is a force of nature, inducing planetary transformations of stratographical scale.
In light of on-going debates around this paradigmatic shift, Project 88 presents Earth Bound, a group exhibition that intimates how nature too has become manmade. Trees that grow, branch out through the manual layering of video stills (Rohini Devasher). Shorelines shift (Mahesh Baliga), sunsets break, the weather moves inside of me (Neha Choksi). In a refrigerator where mould is frozen, a cauliflower looks like a mushroom cloud explosion (Prajakta Potnis). Time stops but does not die (Raqs Media Collective), which is to say that even if life on earth was to cease, the geological impact of humanity will remain, both unpredicted and unending (Pallavi Paul).
In Chittagong, ships that dock are scrapped and buried, forming graves of steel in the ground that are metonyms of modernity (Shumon Ahmed). Elsewhere, creatures with post human tendencies dance on landfills of eternity (Tejal Shah), like abstractions of science fiction in terra valley (Sandeep Mukherjee). In Fukushima, mutation hangs over the catastrophe like a suspended possibility (The Otolith Group). Whereas in Bhopal, a forensic surgeon was infected by gas trapped in the lung of a victim while carrying out an autopsy. (Sarnath Banerjee). The aftermath is invisible; the dead can kill.
The artworks in the exhibition are like infinitesimal interventions. They come together in a choreographic sequence that invite the viewer to consider how in the era of the Anthropocene, it is the future of the Earth to which we are bound that haunts the present.
