The Artist and The Anthropocene
Sisters of the Moon (2022) by Poulomi Basu. Source: WaterAid
In interaction with contemporary South Asian art, Jahnabi Mitra asks, how can artists truly help with climate change action? What larger purpose can these works serve? Or do they end up normalizing the dystopic times ahead?
On October 29, a young man representing Just For Oil—a coalition of climate change activists—glued his head to Johannes Vermeer masterpiece painting The Girl with a Pearl Earring. This incident, and a larger series of recent climate change protests by Just For Oil, Letzte Generation, and others, have made a number of recent headlines, igniting critical discussions about art and activism.
The protestors at the museum asked a simple question: “How do you feel when you see something beautiful and priceless apparently being destroyed before your eyes?”
There lies a far more complex critique of incidents like these. For many, the acts of vandalism have already had a grave impact. How, we wonder, have protests reached a point where protestors have to throw soup on Van Gogh’s work?
Contemplating the on-lines of eco-terrorism and vandalism, we ask ourselves, is destruction the only route to a sustainable future?
Climate change protest vs. climate change arts engagement
Eco-art or climate change art could be an alternative for our eco-anxieties. In the years between 2016 and 2022, we saw a phenomenal increase in the number of Indian artists engaging with environmental issues through art. Artists’ works are now centred on the recognition that we have entered into the ‘Anthropocene’: a new geologic era marked by the impact of human activity on the earth. Eco-artists create visualizations ranging from critique to practical demonstrations and shading into other current tendencies, like social practice, relational aesthetics, environmental activism, and systems theory.
Ebbing Away of Identity with the Tides (2018) by Sushavan Nandy. Image Source: British Journal of Photography.
Nature has always inspired and challenged artists. Throughout history, many artists have looked at nature without creating a dyadic segregation of nature vs. culture, but as an extension of our human lives. In this, the artists have reassessed their relationship with ecology ranging from conservation and memory to instilling human responsibility towards the environment.
Artist Dharmendra Prasad is one such artist who works with the human-nature continuum in terms of occupational practices and indigenous knowledge systems. Some of his works visualized the spatiality of farms from Assam and Bihar as site specific installations. Sushavan Nandy’s Ebbing Away of Identity with the Tides, a photographic series on low lying islands of Sunderbans and the devastating effects of climate change on its rising water levels, is another such timely reminder of climate change’s direct impact on marginalized lives.
Some of these works are speculative and dystopic, and some are closer to reality. The question remains, however, of how far artists can truly help with climate change action. What larger purpose can these works serve? Do they end up normalizing the dystopic times ahead? How does the artist evaluate change in the undoing of this harm?
Representation vs. Implementation
Collaborations between social initiatives, multidisciplinary researchers, as well as individual artists, have taken climate change art out of museums and out to the fields. This ‘field art’, might not be celebrated with the same high culture status of installations in the museums, but it does serve a working ground for engaging community action and representation.
Henri Cartier-Bresson in the 1930’s remarked “The world is going to pieces and people like [Ansel] Adams and [Edward] Weston are photographing rocks!”. His plea was for artists to create socially engaged art; to create art that represents the socio-political in ways that it allows us to transform.
What Cartier-Bresson demanded, and the kind of climate change action that we demand today, requires an invested change from market, state and population. Voices on the streets as well as voices held at the art galleries. Books, podcasts, and other forms of art on climate change can provide impetus to these broad structural changes, and can help to create a dialogical space for us to immerse ourselves against problematic climate change politics. If we look at the last five-six years, protest culture has been a part of the youth’s remark against the environmental failures. These are failures that demand answers for the inaction by present generation, and not just from those in the past.
While such protests create a sense of deadlines, they are also hubristic in terms of the real challenges, which are complex human and ecological predicaments that need to be brought about by a slow and sustainable framing of the issues. Art, and its interaction with environmental emergencies, falls somewhere in the midway of the urgency of protest culture on environmental issues and this slowness of sustainable structural change.
Art for Implementation
In 2014, the Kolkata based multidisciplinary Poulomi Basu created a photo essay titled Sisters of the Moon, an evocative, 14-image photo series to support WaterAid’s Thirst for Knowledge, with an appeal to bring clean water and toilets to tens of thousands of girls in Nepal. Her series was a fictive portrayal on the issues of lack of clean water and sanitation and how it disempowers women. Basu states that she derives her inspiration at the cross-sections of ecofeminism and intersecting identities. Her work draws attention to the role of gender and how it intersects with water crisis. Sisters of the Moon is her attempt to portray the dystopian future where women are stripped of their right to earth and water.
The photographer creates otherworldly self-portraits shot in Iceland using surrealistic art direction and costumes by Irvin Van Herpen, Richard Malone, Aziz Rebar and Jivomir Domoustchiev. Some images, for instance, use bridal costumes as a reference to early marriage of girls in Bardiya. Another is a photograph inspired by the story of a girl who lost her home to the rising water levels in Bangladesh. All these images have a meticulous eye for storytelling.
Dzokou Valley, An Elegy for Ecology (2021) - Installation by Sharbendu De. Image Courtesy: Courtesy of Khoj International Artists’ Association via StirWorld.com
What sets apart Basu’s project from other eco-art is that these photos were framed for directed impact, aimed to raise money for clean water, decent toilets, and good hygiene in homes and schools worldwide, to ensure girls have a chance to learn in dignity and safety. This project was an extension to the funding provided by UK Government of £2 million to help bring water and sanitation to additional 28,000 people and 30 schools in Bardiya. Basu found her inspiration from her own early childhood experience, growing up in a family where all the women were married off at a young age. Lack of water has a wide-ranging effect on education of girls in the district. An increasing number of girls in Bardiya drop out of school or are being married off as girls are required to fetch water.
Basu’s work remains as an exemplar of arts and action implementation. Yet, there is an alternative way of extending this discourse, a rethinking of what entails as ‘art’, and if climate change campaigns could even be bracketed as art.
Sustainable Initiatives
While we often look at climate change issues from the lens of systemic flaws, we mustn’t forget to ask about the more pressing, personal issues. Do community members know that their daughters might be dropping out of school due to rising temperatures? Well, not entirely. Cultural and historical reasons are often seen as the linear causality. But, too often, these issues are often interlinked with the world’s diverse ecologies and international politics.
Collaborations between social initiatives, multidisciplinary researchers, as well as individual artists, have taken climate change art out of museums and out to the fields. This ‘field art’, might not be celebrated with the same high culture status of installations in the museums, but it does serve a working ground for engaging community action and representation.
Disappearing Dialogues is one such initiative, by and large working with the community of the slowly submerging East Kolkata Wetlands through participatory processes. Their activities have included creating awareness on the circular economy in the wetlands, conducting ‘Wetlands Nature Explorers’, a guided tour of Kolkata’s wetlands, and even engaging the students from the wetlands to curate an art exhibit for the 2019 Climate Diplomacy Week.
The Water Seekers’ Fellowship in collaboration between Living Waters Museum and the Social and Political Research Foundation, and is yet another platform where young researchers across the country explore the water conservation landscape through the visual mediums of photography or documentary. The fellowship also adds to the ongoing discourse around decentralised water governance and recognising decentralised water technologies as a means to ensure water security.
Palpable Futures
I experienced the palpability of global warming when I moved to Delhi in December 2021. I felt the heaviness of the air in my lungs—lungs that were not used to metropolitan air. I started worrying and panicked excessively. I wondered about the irreversible harm it caused to my body. I read some more. I wondered if I would ever be able to carry a child if I lived in this toxic air for long.
To live in New Delhi is to be in constant and intimate communion with toxicity, being marked in a bodily way by where you live and what you breathe. What world opens up to us when we think of our bodies as a site for what the Spanish architect and academic, Nerea Calvillo, calls “attuned sensing”?
Soon after, I visited “Does the Blue Sky Lie?” at Khoj International Artists Centre. It was a show where several artists came together to project a dystopian future without clean air to breathe. For instance, the multi-disciplinary artist Sharbendu De’s work Dzokou Valley, An Elegy for Ecology, is a site-specific installation with green spaces brought indoors and oxygen masks and cylinders. This particular work depicted a future where households would have oxygen cylinders for an artificially-created “nature” indoors.
Although most works in the exhibit had an overarching theme of climate catastrophe, and even a sense of sadness at the core human level, I was still able to find solace in the presence of art. In the dedication of artists who sat for months, years, contemplating and researching, and creating works on climate change. There was some solace in the sensorial closeness to a possible future.
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Jahnabi Mitra is a psychologist and an independent researcher from Guwahati, Assam. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Psychology at Ambedkar University, Delhi. Previously, she worked as a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the Assam Royal Global University. You can find her on Instagram: @jahnabi_m.
