Images From The Chilling Future To Which We Are Headed

Excerpt from Artist Statement

Envisioned as a trilogy, in the first part, I speculate a future where heat waves and air toxicity has accelerated extinction of floral and faunal species and confined us indoors. Estrangement from nature has amplified loneliness and solastalgia. Trees and animals have entered private spaces, and clean oxygen has entered the commerce of human relationships. Through this series of mise-en-scènes using symbolic motifs like animal-shaped inflatable pools and caged animals, the series alludes towards a future we seem to be headed.

Excerpt from Curatorial Essay by Ravi Agarwal

Today, all global is local. The immediate is everywhere. These images can be from everyplace, anywhere. They are not directly political but testimonies of lived human conditions, yet they hold the politics of the moment in their layered presence. As the global and local intermesh, the indeterminable flows between the past and the present, the here and elsewhere—all markers of the Anthropocene, an era where many previous planetary boundaries are being broken by human agency and what we know is unsettling and uncertain. Like air, this moment diffuses and circulates, in an ether of past-present and futures, merging them into a continuum which challenges all simple causality and linearity. Airborne pollutants are not just particles, but are centuries of mined earth, excavated by millions of human desires in desperate pursuits of an elusive happiness. They reflect the broken promise of a techno-capitalistic trajectory.

Sharbendu De is a contemporary lens-based artist, academic and writer

(This appeared in print as 'An Elegy for Ecology')