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    Curatorial Note

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    Jatin Kumar

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    Curatorial Note

    Uploaded by

    Jatin Kumar
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    © © All Rights Reserved

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    Curatorial Note

    Uploaded by

    Jatin Kumar

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 3

    48◦C Public.Art.

    Ecology

    From the 1960s through most of the 1990s, the Left considered environmentalism to be
    ‘soft politics’. While the bold action of Greenpeace and the extremes of 'eco-terrorism’
    had to be acknowledged, for the most part those who supposedly cared more for the earth
    and its creatures/creations than for people's revolutions were perceived as acting from a
    kind of political surburbia. Today, sparked by indisputable proof of human agency in
    climate change, the environment is in the centre foreground. It has become the radical
    edge.
    – Lucy R. Lippard, Beyond the Beauty Strip

    Envisioned as a „festival‟, this three-week experiment is located in the metropolitan city


    of Delhi. It aspires, as Lippard suggests above, to lodge the theme of environment in “the
    centre foreground” as the new radical edge in contemporary art practice.
    The festival will attempt to interrogate the precarious ecology of India‟s capital city
    through the prism and aesthetic strategies of contemporary art. Situated in various public
    spaces around Delhi, artworks will try to draw a complex and diverse public into this
    critical imaginary.

    The City

    By any score, Delhi qualifies as one amongst the world‟s most dynamic and complex
    contemporary urban settings. Like most other Indian and south Asian urban centres, the
    city is characterised by an intimately layered historicity and multiple, demanding,
    expanding urbanisms that clash unremittingly as they stake different claims to validity,
    autonomy and expression within Delhi‟s material and cultural fabric.
    With over 16 million people, the city faces new challenges of growth and change both
    from self-generated internal demands and the externally imposed pressures of
    globalisation. Though it retains its historical place as the political and administrative
    capital of India, and as the modern „centre of power‟, it is today, in both logistical and
    aspirational terms, a node in a global political-economic scenario increasingly subject to
    the forces of capital, seen and unseen. This has compelled a shift in India‟s development
    trajectory and led to an escalated „unbundling‟ of the nation-state from an earlier
    socialistic, centrally-controlled schema towards a liberal market-centric global economy,
    dramatically skewing the template from a „public-good‟ to a „private-gain‟ focus.
    Prevalent urban planning policies are consequently under tremendous pressure to address
    the consequences of this shift. The presence, nature and intent of the intervening profit-
    driven forces of globalisation are coercing rapid and seemingly irreversible change within
    the functional, physical and social content of existing space in Delhi. Within this

    48◦C Public.Art.Ecology 1
    aggressive dynamic of ongoing „progress‟, the urban environment inevitably became and
    has remained a massive leading casualty.

    While concern for Delhi‟s ecology receives fragmented attention, usually following
    infrastructure-related civic crises, and periodic lip service from city agencies, the meshed
    social issues of environmental access, control and distribution continue to be a serious
    and exponentially growing problem. Imbalances arising from the unthinking abuse, brutal
    overuse and relentless degradation of urban environmental services has almost compelled
    an overlap in the calibration of natural and manmade ecological disasters.

    The festival‟s title, 48◦C Public.Art.Ecology, is thus an urgent reference to the


    exigencies of global warming which can be felt in Delhi's continuously escalating
    summer temperatures, as also to the frenzied paradoxes of a city that seems to be in
    perpetual, strident overdrive, yet is also mutely, violently, „running on empty‟… The
    snarled throb of daily gridlock, the grotesque, gigantic spasms of steel and concrete
    structures, the rags of cloud drifting across glass-faced corporate towers, the obdurate
    stratigraphy of caked roadside detritus, the phantom horizon: all these are
    superimpositions on an urban matrix whose embedded reality is fracture, rupture,
    corrosion, squalor and steady decay.

    These signifiers notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to inscribe Delhi‟s struggle


    within the discourse of catastrophe. Offering a crucial counter-rhetoric, the festival‟s
    documentation of city ecology is also a metaphorical celebration of what needs to be
    featured in “the centre foreground” – the human spirit and its flexible optimism,
    innovation, grit and resilience; and the tangled absurdities and sanctities that mark the
    anxiously seething, embattled yet miraculously cohesive major cities of the „developing‟
    world.

    The Festival

    Negotiating Delhi‟s sprawl of 1,500 square kilometers to identify appropriate spaces for
    the creation of themed public art was in itself a complex feat. Eight physical locations
    have been identified as possible sites for temporary art projects. These are broadly
    grouped under three tentative and introductory perceptions:

    > Of interfaces, encounters and memories


    > Of ceremony and the everyday
    > Of community aspirations vs. metropolitan mega-dreams

    These groupings conceptually accommodate a wide range of environmental conditions.


    Some are obvious scripts, others are in the mode of subtext. Each individual site connects

    48◦C Public.Art.Ecology 2
    to an identified stretch or cluster of easily accessible places in the city, with connotative
    significance and relevance. The sites aggregate into an experimental cross-section of
    Delhi‟s numerous historical and contemporary urban ecologies that, for all sorts of
    reasons, may be stubbornly ingrained within the collective sensibilities of the citizens, or
    may be negated, fissured, abandoned and erased under the new imperatives of
    globalisation.

    The Metro – a work-in-progress urban showpiece and icon of 21st-century Delhi – is a


    stable connecting grid between the sites, to provide easy access to the project for masses
    of daily commuters. It is simultaneously an invitation to the city‟s car-driving, art-loving
    population to alter their mental cartography through using the Metro to reach the project
    sites.

    Welcome to 48◦C Public.Art.Ecology. We look forward to your participation and


    collaboration.

    Pooja Sood
    Artistic Director and Curator

    Sites input and research: Urban Resource Group, Delhi

    This project is commissioned by the Goethe-Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi
    and the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ), New Delhi.

    48◦C Public.Art.Ecology 3

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