Sprouting with Time: An Interview with Ravi Agarwal

The notion of time, as it comes to be understood and claimed across the world, remains a vast and limitless conceptualisation, constantly expanding and gaining multitudes within its meanings. Nothing is singular about how we grasp time; nothing is standardised in how we interpret it, and there is no one way in which we are able to define its affective onslaught. It becomes interesting to then think about what enquiries into the nature of time produce, what they might instigate as explorations, and where these might lead us as we continue to investigate not just our present moment but also our fast-disintegrating future with its unpredictability. Keeping with this strand of thought, it is also significant to note the manner in which creative practices—across mediums, materials and mobilities—continue to investigate these temporal possibilities, attitudes and makings. 

Time as a Mother is an exhibition by Ravi Agarwal and Damian Christinger that brings together seven artists and three poets, interacting with the poetics of time by reading and framing its intersections with the geological epoch of the Anthropocene and its evolving ecological conditions. Currently on view at the Old PWD Complex in Panjim, Goa, as part of the 8th edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival 2023, the display platforms an engrossing progression of moving image and video art. The works invite viewers to think of time beyond abstraction and instead witness the reality of how it shapes the world around us and our immersions in it. In this edited interview, artist and curator Ravi Agarwal speaks of his journey with this exhibition, its ideations and future possibilities. 

Annalisa Mansukhani (AM): Through the kinds of works and perspectives it brings together, Time as a Mother invites us to consider the nuances of our relationships with nature and the environments we inhabit. What led you to this particular mapping of themes, mediums and practices? 

Ravi Agarwal (RA): There is a story in everything, and there is a story here as well. Serendipity Arts Festival was gracious enough to offer me the opportunity to display these exhibitions—Time as a Mother and Blue Carbon—both of which I have been involved with for a while. Damian Christinger and I met a few years ago, when he was working on a big installation by Ernesto Neto in Zurich (Main Station). There, he had invited the Huni Kuin people, an indigenous community living in the Amazon region near the Brazilian border with Peru, and tried to create a multidisciplinary, multiknowledge framework and conversation. He invited me and a couple of other people to participate and speak there, and we have kept in touch since. We then got back in touch when I applied for a Pro Helvetia grant for my research on landscapes as constructed spaces. I was working with printmakers in Edinburgh, Scotland, exploring the history of colonisation and the image of the Scottish landscape as a “postcard place”, something that came into the world as a construct in the eighteenth century. I have been interested in history and the lineage of changing climate conditions, and I was trying to find places and people that were thinking along similar lines. Christinger took me to Tenna, a former municipality in the district of Surselva in the canton of Graubünden in Switzerland, where this community is looking at tourism and how to maintain their sanctity as a community.

I am very interested in the multiple ways in which knowledge is found. So my conversations with Christinger have drawn from these directions of enquiry that we were cumulatively interested in. Also stemming from this is my fascination with the dialogue between arts and science, a dialogue that I see as a trans- or post-disciplinary exploration to which one can bring a sensibility extracted from other ways of knowledge-making.

I have been speaking to many artists and scientists who deal with this dialogue, and coupled with my own training, I too am interested in this intersection. There is no singular definition of what one can expect from such a collaboration or such intersections. Largely, it tends to be about scientists wanting artists to illustrate their communications. To me, it is much more than that. It is about finding new ways of knowing the world. I was part of a research trip last year to Switzerland, where I met a lot of artists and curators working on ecology. This led me to think about how great it would be to do a video show that can look at these shared equations from transcultural positions. Because ecology is transcultural, it is expansive in its very nature and it is something that needs to be framed as such. It cannot be defined as a planetary position alone. 

I am also witness to the search for alternate systems of knowledge. I know that is underway, for instance, as a lot of European artists proceed to South America to bring these varied perspectives in. But one is urged to think—in these cases, what does inclusion mean? I am always very suspicious of inclusion because it is a term borrowed from the World Bank in terms of development policy, it not something that is related to equity. Inclusion is not equity. It is not about challenging the centre, it is mostly about including the periphery. I am more interested in a mutual contestation—a mutual shift that can extend beyond these small acts of translation that we try to do when we seek to accommodate different perspectives and alternate ways of knowing.

Some of these positions from South America are ontological positions; they are not just ways of seeing, they are ways of being. As a Peruvian woman said to an anthropologist, “I am not on the land, I am the land.” So there are no ways to decipher that language in Western epistemology or in the history of knowledge. There is no separation of the self from the observer, which is very classically the scientific objective method. I think, for a long time, the problem has been onto-epistemological. It is a complex problem.

I have taken this challenge upon myself to inform and look closely at this trajectory itself—this trajectory of catastrophe that we are on today. Climate change is a result of this trajectory, and we cannot fix it by simply changing technology. The problem must be addressed from a far deeper and more personal location, from personal ways of thinking about living and being in the world.

AM: In what ways do you think this exhibition encourages new approaches towards understanding these ways of living and being in the world? 

RA: Time as a Mother came out of Christinger’s and my desire to show a few practices together because there have not been so many such shows. As video travels easily, we knew it would not be programmatically difficult to do. It also started from the place of asking: Why don’t we, as an art circuit, critically engage with such practices of video-making? These are starkly different ways of making and of thinking about aesthetics and process, which need to be engaged with enthusiastically. 

Christinger and I are artists who became friends, and even with this exhibition, we are more friends than curators. We wanted to work with practices in India that are looking keenly at ecological positions and working with video. With Dharmendra Prasad, for instance, I am very familiar with his practice. And it has been wonderful to see how he has been finding his feet with new mediums and experimentation. We encouraged him to work with film as a form of expression that is outside of a narrative grounding and can speak more to his own non-linear ways of looking. 

Both Christinger and I are interested in research, and it becomes even more exciting to look at work that takes shape through research. Whether it is Flurina Badel’s multi-channel projection on changing forms and ecosystems, Ursula Biemann's film on indigenous knowledge systems, or Monica Ursina Jäger’s mutichannel installation on sand, all these works speak through the language of aesthetics without being aestheticised themselves. They have developed and framed a language that unravels through their work and the themes they address without having to decorate their vision unnecessarily. We are also very interested in how the Anthropocene, time and temporality are treated transculturally. So we invited Nitoo Das and Ranjit Hoskote to contribute poems. The poetic is an important frame to include, and we look forward to having these be a part of the display.

There is also something that I have not talked about very widely, which is that I have been having conversations with lots of young artists who are going to residencies abroad. They are young and sometimes may not be very confident of their practices. They get taken in by the whole circuit of circulation and installation. Their practice gets shaken a bit. I say to them, “You know where your practice comes from. Let people deal with your complexity.” For instance, when we talk about caste, a Western curator may not want to deal with the complexity of such a reality; they get confused and perplexed by its nuances. However, I ask these young artists to stand by what they wish to say because this complexity is familiar to them. It is theirs to present, share and talk about. It becomes important to not get swayed by the act of inclusion. What I understand now is that the next generation of artists does not wish to be included. They want to create their own trajectories of assertion, not in a nativist way but in a productive way. How do we contribute to a global conversation with our own knowledge systems and with what we want to say? These questions are global, no matter where they come from. And they cannot be treated as singular. These are the desires I wish to make visible with Time as a Mother. 

For the Blue Carbon show, Jahnavi Phalkey and I decided to work on the carbon captured by the world’s oceans and coastal ecosystems. Phalkey was very generous with her and the museum’s networks—she brought in Vardhan Patankar, a marine biologist and scientist with a very immersive practice. We were also able to collaborate with Waylon D’Souza and Kaldi Moss. The show brings new research to new audiences, and we are very excited to see what comes through with this collaboration. We did not put any restrictions; rather, we simply extended a proposition so that they could work to respond to this research. We see them as practitioners on an equal platform, coming together to engage in a space. 

AM: As the show brings together perspectives from Indian and European backgrounds, showcasing an exciting platforming of shared urgencies, I am interested to know more about the possibilities that were shaped by video/moving image as a medium that thinks so deeply about time and its materiality. What were the kinds of cultural meanings of time and temporality that came through here? How did you aim to bridge or highlight these cultural convergences/divergences? 

RA: All the artists deal with it differently. Monica Ursina Jäger’s video, Liquid Time: An Earthly Archive of Weathering Thoughts (2022), is on sand as a natural resource. It looks at erosion and entanglement through perspectives that range from a grain of sand to the human body, the city and the cosmos. Her work closely examines this moment in the present, the idea of materials in deep time, and what they mean for us. Ursula Biemann’s Forest Mind (2021) brings in a conversation with the indigenous Inca community in Colombia, whom she has worked with over several years. Their notion of time does not subscribe to a linear passage but instead focuses on a more eco-centric worldview that places the earth at the centre of how we witness and experience it. Paribartana Mohanty’s Four Songs of the Apocalypse (2021) takes you to the coasts of Odisha and the ecological collapse that it is currently witnessing. The video brings in mythology and folk traditions to look at narratives of disaster, with all the performers wearing PPE kits, indicating a foretelling or foreboding of sorts with regard to the climate crisis. The show also speaks about perceptions of your own locations in the world and the sense of what that means. In some way, these works bring in a cultural idea of time that breaks the mainstream narrative of how we tell a story of time. If I may say, the “cleanest” narrative is Navjot Altaf’s Soul Breath Wind (2014–18) and, if possible, even Monica Ursina Jäger’s work. The other videos deal with more disordered notions of time, rooted spiritually and culturally in other knowledge systems. 

This question of how we think of time becomes an important locational idea of how we think about the Anthropocene, which is in some way placed in linear time, in linear ecological time. This is where works like Mohanty’s and Bienmann’s come in to complicate these linear transitions between phases and epochs because they lead you elsewhere to more potent understandings of time. The works have different temporalities in how they move; when you see the videos, you are left with a more complicated idea of time, even beyond “entanglement.” 

AM: How do both of these exhibitions—Time as a Mother and Blue Carbon—extend your own thinking with the field and of the field? As the Festival is a transient space, are there other forms you envision for these enquiries located here? 

RA: I rarely refer to my curations as a curatorial practice. I am a curious explorer of ideas. Art is something very productive for me. Working with artists engenders a very productive space for me, especially within the Shared Ecologies programme that I organise through the Shyama Foundation. I am interested in going where I let practices lead me in order to think deeper, to look deeper. I engage with practices as indicators of what is happening in the present. I engage with them with as much of an open heart and mind as I can, so as to be able to listen to them more sensitively. This is where I feel art and artists can sense the future better; this is the most exciting part of being in the art world. My position as a curator—a word with so many meanings—takes shape through the practices that are shared with me. 

As a “curator”, I work with practices that interest me and that I trust to lead me somewhere. I am intrigued by the processual and the simple economy of the artist, which can be so productive in its own way. I believe the economy of the artist should not limit the ideas of the artist, and that is what I am interested in: the idea itself. That is really more important, and I see such exciting work coming from young artists who remain so free and unbridled in their idea-oriented practices, wandering away from object-led outcomes. The desire to continually exhibit finished, final products and outcomes excludes those who don’t have or don’t work with permanent studio spaces or resources. The question for me then becomes: How do we keep these practices away from necessarily finished outcomes? How do we move away from aesthetic finalisation to instead think more about the process and the intermediate nature of it, where an idea leads us to new places and new findings? These questions push one to find and showcase practices that really expand the boundaries of how we can talk about ecology and the environment in new ways. We need to contest the edge of these conversations; we need to move beyond repeating the same methodologies with new mediums. 

I am interested in pushing these boundaries and extending these conversations. With Shared Ecologies, I want to be sure to encourage these practices to remain, as well as to find new ways of sustaining them, to urge them to continue to make, envision and image. These are also ways to tell young artists to learn new techniques and participate in new dialogues, but to keep their groundings fiercely intact. This is my hope to keep challenging these conversations beyond the disappointments of global policy. We need a revolution of new ideas, and I see this happening with the new practices that are coming forth. As establishments, institutions and people with agency, I am keen to extend these practices to new forums and heights, not only within my own practice but also with the collaborations I get the chance to be part of. I am keen to continue trying.

Time as a Mother and Blue Carbon are being exhibited at the Old PWD building as a part of the Serendipity Arts Festival until 23 December, 2023.

To learn more about Ravi Agarwal’s curatorial approach, revisit the walkthrough of his show New Natures: A Terrible Beauty is Born (2022).

To learn more about ASAP | art’s coverage of this year’s Serendipity Arts Festival, read Arundhati Chauhan’s conversation with Veeranganakumari Solanki on her exhibition Synaesthetic Notations and Annalisa Mansukhani’s conversation with Vidya Shivadas on her show Turning: On Field and Work.

Images courtesy of Annalisa Mansukhani.