In Person: Carbon with Ravi Agarwal and David Verghese

Carbon, curated by the Science Gallery Bengaluru in collaboration with Ravi Agarwal, reflects upon carbon as “buried sunshine” as it explores the limits and conditions of the possibility of carbon as both substance and phenomenon. The exhibition contemplates the dialectic inherent in the very nature of carbon. On the one hand, carbon is foundational to fundamental forms that structure life—DNA, proteins, respiration. In its various avatars, it is imperative to ecological processes. For instance, Carbon-14 forms the basis for radiocarbon dating, while Carbon-12 was used as the standard to determine atomic weights and now, mass, by Dmitri Mendeleev. Carbon dioxide has become the measure for the flow of exchange between the environment and the economy.

On the other hand, carbon’s ability to form compounds such as diamonds, graphite, coal and black carbon—deemed precious by capital’s mechanism of value determination and, hence, containers of the state’s drive toward developmental “progress”—has rendered carbon complicit in ecological imbalance as well as the material oppression of working lives. If labour forms the bedrock for processes of mineral extraction in which carbon is manipulated for  capitalist profit, even as it is itself exploited. Yet labour remains invisible within contemporary discourses around climate change, in which concerns of alarming levels of fossil fuel in consumption-driven economies have resulted in the demonisation of carbon as destructive of life. Consequently, a “carbon market of pardon” has not only separated extraction and consumption from direct consequences, it has rendered as dispensable, labouring lives that ground the modalities of any renewed relationship with the environment. 

A selection of ten works from the original exhibition at the Science Gallery, the exhibit at the Excise Building in Panjim, as part of the 9th edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival held in Goa from 15-22 December 2024, showcases artists Annelie Berner, Susan Eyre, Marina Zurkow, David Hochagatterer, Dhiraj Kumar Nite, Manoj Deshwal, Piloo Deshwal, Uma Deshwal, Jan Swierkowski, Jane Tingley, Maria Joseph, Shanatamani Muddalah, Roddam Narasimha, Suresh Madhusudan Deshpande, Chandrashekarappa Praveen and Belur Raghavan Rakshith. In their various works, they ask, how do we navigate our relationship with nature when the very things we do to alleviate our carbon footprint create new forms of ecological disruption? How does carbon mediate the realms between the cosmic universe and the earth? How do we sense the hidden experience of trees? How did fossil fuels become so pervasive? What are the everyday forms of carbon present in our lives? What are the desires of miners whose precarious lives depend on coal?

Experimenting with the potential porosity between art and the history of science, Carbon critiques the processes by which time has begun to be organised along diverging chronologies: between geo-biological time shaped by planetary memory and historical time as shaped by human action. In so doing, it pushes us to ask, is it really carbon that is the devil in the story? Or do we need to rethink the very capitalist structures that enable and prioritise carbon’s capacity for ecological damage? What kind of imaginary of nature does such an endeavour require, so we can be more sensitive to carbon as both a finite natural resource and as holding infinite potential for life? 

Ravi Agarwal has an interdisciplinary practice as an artist, photographer, environmental campaigner, writer and curator. Bridging the divide between art and activism, he addresses the entangled questions of nature and its futures using photography, video, text and installation. His book The Power Plant: Fragments in Time (2023) is a diary and photo document of the unfulfilled promise of modernity through technological projects and the book Down and Out (2002) was a first major photographic work on migrant labour in India. Alongside, he is the founder and director of the environmental NGO Toxics Link and founder of The Shyama Foundation which supports art and ecology practices in India.

David Verghese is Production Associate at the Science Gallery Bengaluru. An architect and urban planner by training, Verghese has been working with artists for the past few years and tries to use the best of his skillsets to aid in various transdisciplinary projects. 

(Featured image: Installation view of Foresta Inclusive (ex)tending-towards [2020-23] by Jane Tingley at Carbon, as part of the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa. Image courtesy of the author.)

Recorded on 17 December 2024.

To learn more about this year’s edition of SAF, watch the previous episode of In Person with Dayananda Nagaraju and Niranjan NB as they speak about their project The Everlasting River (2024) and Aparna Chivukula’s essay on Ghosts in Machines (2024) curated by Damian Christinger.

To learn more about Ravi Agarwal’s curatorial practice, read his interview with Annalisa Mansukhani about the exhibition Time as a Mother (2023) at the previous edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival and watch his walkthrough of New Natures: A Terrible Beauty is Born (2022) at the Goethe Institut, Mumbai.