[Reader-list] ART, ECOLOGY, POLITICS: A ROUND TABLE

[Kavya Murthy]

ART, ECOLOGY, POLITICS: A ROUND TABLE

Venue : Seminar Room, Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054
Date : February 1, 2013, Friday.
Time :  5 pm


A new configuration of ecology and politics has emerged in the
post-globalisation decades, with debates around nuclear power,
forests, mining, toxicity, urbanism, and GM crops joining new ways of
thinking about water, air, and land. These debates, movements and
ecological emergences have also foregrounded an emerging
eco-aesthetics. As artists, filmmakers and social theorists have
addressed this moment in their work.

The questions of eco-aesthetics has now become a critical one in the
context of a general rhetorical charge of ‘saving the environment’ by
states, corporation and various financial elites. Eco-aesthetics
traverses not just domain of art practice but also of social and
political theory - the links between humans and non-human formations,
debates on political ecology, and the possibility of alternatives
beyond the present.

A recent special issue of the journal Third Text looks at many of the
issues above. This roundtable brings some of the contributors from the
Third Text issue as well as other speakers to open up the larger
question of eco-aesthetics in the postcolonial world.


SPEAKERS-

T.J. Demos
Ravi Agarwal
Sheba Chhachhi
Raqs Media Collective
Sanjay Kak


_________________________________________________________________________

T.J. Demos is a Reader in the Art History Department at University
College London. He writes widely on modern and contemporary art and
politics, and is the author of Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of
Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013);  and The
Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global
Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013). He also guest-edited Third Text
120 (January 2013) on “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology.”


Ravi Agarwal is an artist, writer, curator and environmentalist. He
explores issues of urban space, ecology, capital in an interrelated
way, working with  photographs, video, performance, on-site
installations, and public art. His earlier work was as a documentary
photographer was on labour and the street.  Agarwal has participated
in several international curated shows including Document XI (Kassel
2002), Horn Please (Berne 2007) Indian Highway (2009 -2012), Newtopia
(2012) as well as several national shows and solo shows. He writes
extensively on ecological issues, and is also founder director of the
Indian environmental NGO, Toxics Link.


Sheba Chhachhi works with lens based images, both still and moving,
investigating questions of gender, ecology, violence and visual
culture. Her work often recuperates ancient iconography, myth and
visual traditions to calibrate an inquiry into the contemporary
moment. Chhachhi began in the 1980s, both activist and photographer,
documenting the women’s movement in India. By the 1990s, Chhachhi
moved to creating collaborative staged photographs, eventually turning
to large photo based multimedia installations. Her photographic work
retrieves marginal worlds: of women, mendicants, and forgotten forms
of labour. Chhachhi creates immersive environments, bringing the
contemplative into the political in both site-specific public art and
independent works. She has exhibited widely in India and
internationally. Chhachhi lives and works in Delhi.

The Raqs Media Collective [Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and
Shuddhabrata Sengupta] enjoys playing a plurality of roles, often
appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, sometimes as
philosophical agent provocateurs. They make contemporary art, have
made films, curated exhibitions, edited books, staged events,
collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers and
theatre directors. Their work, which has been exhibited  widely in
major international spaces and events, locates them along the
intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical
speculation research and theory. They live and work in Delhi, and
co-founded the Sarai programme at the Centre for the Study of
Developing Societies (www.sarai.net) in 2000.

Sanjay Kak is an independent documentary film-maker based in New
Delhi, and his work includes Words on Water, Jashn-e-Azadi (How We
Celebrate Freedom), and the forthcoming Red Ant Dream. He writes
occasional commentaries and reviews books he is passionate about.