The inaugural exhibition at Anant Art gallery’s capacious new space opens in a city that has been in the grip of GRAP through much of the winter. While the Indian capital monopolises media coverage, toxic air blankets the entire Indo-Gangetic plain, home to a billion people across three nations.
Homo sapiens has been altering environments globally since our species emerged out of Africa and traversed ice-age bridges to settle the farthest points of habitable land, but the scale and unsustainability of its depredations are now manifest as never before in Delhi, Lahore, Dhaka and dozens of similarly overcrowded towns. The earth has lost a third of its forest cover in the past ten thousand years, around half of that in the last hundred alone, not least because the human population surged far more since 1925 than in the hundred thousand years preceding.
Conversely, contrary to apocalyptic speculations of decades past, birth rates are falling, having dipped below replacement levels in over half the world’s nations, India and Bangladesh among them. The earth continues to teem with wildlife, and primeval forests still cover more than 30% of its land. In the words of Tennyson, though much is taken, much abides.
The domain of humanity is marked by bustle, chaos and conflict, but also all the inventiveness and energy that make homos sapiens such an inordinately successful mammal. Our innate senses of empathy and beauty induce us to value the very phenomena our presence tends to harm, creating hope of some equilibrium being found with and within the natural world.
The works in The Teeming Earth respond to the tension and potentiality suggested by the exhibition’s theme, or can be profitably viewed through that lens. They delve into the symbiosis between fungi, plants and insects; walk paths trodden by our hominin ancestors; and allude to the futuristic dream of reviving extinct species. They revel in the vastness of the ocean and open up landscapes of wonderment, half-remembered and half-imagined. They scrutinise media cover-ups masked as exposés, judicial lethargy that encourages the flouting of regulations, and the environmental consequences of such disregard. They memorialise the marginalised through testaments of material, myth and history, and elevate the domain of the domestic and the quotidian.
These twenty-seven voices offer critique, celebration, and complex articulations between those poles through perspectives on the cruelty and compassion, callousness and reverence, exploitation and solidarity that structure human relations and our engagement with the environment.