How do we find just and joyful ways of existing amid ongoing climate collapse, madness, genocide? How can we hold the incomprehensible in our everyday? What are its unspoken languages? We begin by slipping off the edge of known vocabularies and governable landscapes— a strategic and necessary escape. We get lost in tongueless frenzies and revel in unruly forests. Commune with water-spirits and mourn the forcibly drowned. Dwell with floral spectres and entangle with protesting bodies.
Scape: A stalk directly emerging from the root; also landscape, escape, scapegoat, dreamscape and so on.
—scape brings together South Asian artists, each of whose works are rooted in their located contexts even as they invite us into their expansive somatic, political, and emotional ecologies.
Malik Irtiza’s Thokei follows a figure from her childhood stories and recurring one in her artistic work; Shokpaseen is a shadowy non-being, void-like figure. It was once a songbird, but now roams strange places in search of its home and its tongue, both of which have been stolen. Thokei (spit) flows across waterscapes and (non-) language, absence and profusion, madness and humour.
In his work Gul-e-Curfew, Moonis Ahmad assembles a collection of ‘militant’ ecological beings which take root in colonised territories and spatio-temporal ruptures. As active agents, they affect all beings around them, causing confusion, madness, muteness, nostalgia, remembrance, loss of language. Each image is a composite of hundreds of photographs taken by Ahmad who also writes the displayed texts recording their respective anatomies and becomings. Together, these prints form an alternate taxonomy of flora networks which haunt space and minds, refusing anthropocentric or nation-state classifications.
Nature and Netrabile are inextricable in her work; under-foot, finger-grazed, sensuously-attuned. Her work moves through disaster and decay, regeneration and bloom, in equal measures. Looking, in her worlds, can itself become an act of exhuming. Temporality shifts, unsettling the logics of visual and temporal language.
Puri has its roots in the forests and waterbodies of the Khasi hills in present-day Meghalaya, Sonal Jain’s home. Filled with stories of humans being possessed, we enter not only more-than-human worlds, but also complex histories governing the region, from British-era colonial water governance, to indigenous dictionaries of ecological codes, and gendered mythologies. Based on a series of conversations, research, and meandering, Jain’s artistic text creates a series of portals into hallucinatory states of being-in-between.
Unbecoming is a series of prints by Tejal Shah from which these four were specifically selected for —scape by the artist. These three prints hold the bodies of anonymous migrants found marooned on shores and part of a sinking inflatable raft. Shah tenderly and carefully isolates these bodies from their surroundings in mass media images, suspending them in an eerie and purgatorial non-space. Through this process, she performs a ritual of private mourning.
Amol K Patil traces three different trajectories of mass rural-to-urban migration across the Konkani coast, Delhi, and the changing landscape of Mumbai. This work, which Patil calls his ‘kilometre sculpture’ mirrors not only the paths of these movements and strategies of migration, but also the bodily outline of a worker. A foot signifying the march of a labour protest, a hand raised in defiance against their mythic non-future in the big city.
Text by Ritika Biswas
