Sharbendu De: Prescient Forests
© Sharbendu De
As an artist / photographer what do you question through your work and why?
“I find myself constantly questioning the colonial-paternalistic legacy (mindset) including the stereotypical representations emerging from our shores. Is the ability to imagine a future endemic to the West? I specifically ponder about: If a contemporary history has to be written especially about communities that have gone largely under-represented, misrepresented or unrepresented, do we artists bear the responsibility of devising new strategies to aid re-imagination so as to correct historical wrongs?
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Prescient Forests
Alienation of man from nature has been calamitous. Cartesian dualism arrogates all intelligence and agency to the humans with none to the nonhuman living beings (Amitav Ghosh, 2016) rendering the latter as passive unintelligent liabilities meant to serve the human race, thereby ‘othering’ them. Following the Enlightenment theory propagated in the 17th & 18th century, we have projected man as exceptional, and thus distinctly separate from the rest of the earth’s ecosystem. We have glorified ourselves as exceptional. But, would the mountains and the forests, and it resident birds, butterflies, moths, tigers and deers etc. concur with this history as the absolute history? If they could record the historical (and the present), what would their archives reveal? What if all these nonhuman living agents (including the planet) have maintained records of human-led assaults on the planet and its cohabitants? Given our abrasive tendency for linguistic monoculture, has it ever entered our consciousness that perhaps it is our inability to comprehend those signals?
Posthumanities scholar Eduardo Kohn in How Forests Think writes, “How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things.” It is imperative to acknowledge this circuitous relationship between man, animals, nature and all its cohabitants; that our fate is enmeshed with that of other nonhuman agentive forces, and as these linkages snap—propelled by the hubris of the ‘modern man’—we are nearing the Sixth Extinction.
The series presented here has been scooped out from my long-standing series ‘Imagined Homeland’ made over seven years (2013-19) of working in the dense jungles of Namdapha cohabited by the indigenous Lisu community, along the India-Myanmar border in Arunachal Pradesh, India. Alive with mystical occurrences, these forests influenced my gaze, some of which can be perceived, but most of it remains elusive to the uninitiated.
Acknowledgements: Imagined Homeland was supported by an art research grant from the
India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) and a conceptual photography grant from the Lucie
Foundation.
Ghosh, Amitav, The Great Derangement, Penguin Books, 2016
Kohn, Eduardo, How Forests Think, University of California Press, 2013
>> Visit the Exhibition: Prescient Forests
About Sharbendu De
Sharbendu De is a lens-based artist, academic and a writer. He is the 2022 Visiting Artist Fellow at the Harvard University. A recipient of multiple grants from the MurthyNAYAK Foundation, KHOJ, Prince Claus Fund & ASEF, Lucie Foundation and India Foundation for the Arts, De has widely exhibited across Rencontres d’Arles, Guangdong Times Museum, Asian Art Biennale, BBA Art Galley, Vadehra Art Gallery, PhEST, FORMAT, Serendipity Arts Festival, Geothe Institut Mumbai, MOPLA and Voies Off Awards at the Rencontres d'Arles, among others. Deeply concerned by the ecological conditions he is working on a series of artistic responses about climate change. He lives and teaches in New Delhi.
Sharbendu De https://www.desharbendu.com/
>> Visit the Exhibition: Prescient Forests