The composition of the Shared Ecologies programme at FICA on 13 May 2024, specifically the manner in which the panel discussions were consolidated, helped me acknowledge the density of thinking around ecology within recent exhibitions and programming in India. While the sites of display discussed are primarily concentrated in urban centres, the contexts that were referenced and inhabited in the process are purposefully much wider. The re-presentation (literally) through narratives provided by institutional and independent curators provided a mode through which to access and comprehend these recent exhibitions. Rather than being descriptive, most of the panel presentations were reflective in nature. As an audience member, it was fairly apparent that the presenters were laying out their own stakes and personal preoccupations. These became entry points for listeners to view the exhibitions as making propositions, as sites where multiple references are brought together, and where situated artworks and practices are re-contextualized in dialogue.

At the onset, I want to reference Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa’s conception of documenta fifteen which based its core values and ideas on “lumbung” (Indonesian term for communal rice barn). They attempted not to merely represent “lumbung”, but embed it as an “artistic and economic model rooted in collectivity, communal resource sharing, and equal allocation” into the very structure of the event. Thus, for instance, all participants were invited to be part of collective groups that shared a “collective pot” to co-produce a project, and this engagement went on online for nearly a year prior to the exhibition. The exhibition (which has faced criticism precisely for this reason) was simply an iteration of a much longer and ongoing process of building alternative networks outside of Eurocentric nodes, and to consider collective futures and shared resources to cope with economic and ecological precarity. The exhibition was more for the participants themselves, than for the visitors. Two years hence, it continues to mutate through multiple collaborations across contexts under “lumbung continued”.

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Two of the prompts I received for the report were “exhibitions as a discursive site” as well as “afterlives of exhibitions”. Working in an archive, and also performing a curatorial role and making exhibitions within it, I’ve been interested in the many methodologies of documenting or capturing exhibitions. This pursuit has made me acutely aware of the basic mode of exhibition documentation which includes wide and close photographs, list of artists, and curatorial notes/texts, which provide basic primary sources for art historical research. More recently, exhibitions have a wider circulation which include recorded walkthroughs, interviews that are shared on social media, and reflective publications. I believe that the narrative and performative styles adopted by the speakers of panel discussions for this programme also provide a way for the exhibition to continue to serve its discursive function beyond its spatial and temporal limits. In fact, the speakers did not need to show documents from the exhibitions to be able to expand their own concerns. While several of the exhibitions repeated the artists, each time their articulation shifted, which is fascinating and brings me back to what Arushi mentioned (but I approach it differently) – rather than which exhibition, I’m interested in how it is articulated beyond its site. These panel discussions indeed provided one interesting mode for that to happen.

The third prompt I received for the report was about how “art and ecology can be in conversation and produce new knowledge”. This is a very big question, which I hope I managed to somewhat address via the speakers and through some of my limited summaries. I want to return here to the introductory reference to documenta fifteen and “lumbung”. I feel that all the presentations in the panel gave illuminating insights into the processes that undergird the artistic work and curatorial research in the exhibitions, and also the communities and beings (human and otherwise) that artists are engaging with. It was interesting that there was not much talk of audience—perhaps the base assumption being that all the sites of display discussed were for art milieus. Or, like with ruangrupa, the exhibition is an iteration of, or even an excuse, for experimentation and knowledge exchange that are much more expansive and continuous. In that sense, while the processes may “congeal” or solidify for the duration of the exhibition, they continue afterwards in liquid and semi-liquid states. This Shared Ecologies programme gave a glimpse of this, and I said at the beginning, made me acknowledge the rigour of work happening in the art field in around ecology in the region, with a lot of responsive thinking from within.