In early 2017, designer Gaurav Jai Gupta met Anirudh Sharma, a scientist, to talk about air pollution in the national capital. “The year 2017 was the first time the polluting air of Delhi hit us,” says Gupta, who decided to collaborate with Sharma on a response to the alarming level of poor air quality. Gupta, an alumnus of National Institute of Fashion Technology, Delhi, and Chelsea College of Arts, London, had founded Akaaro, a Delhi-based studio for sustainable fashion, nearly a decade before. The Boston-based Sharma, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher, was the co-founder of Graviky Labs, which had begun making ink out of carbon that is captured from air pollution.
“My medium is fashion and textile and I decided to combine craft and technology because pollution is the biggest problem for Delhi,” says Gupta, who would go on to make a dye from the ‘Air-Ink’ produced by Sharma’s Graviky Labs. Seven years later, Kaalchakra, an artwork by Gupta being displayed at the Sustaina India exhibition in Delhi, uses the dye made from Air-Ink to draw attention to the growing degradation of the natural world. “Collaboration is the way forward where we contribute to each other’s knowledge,” adds Gaurav.
An artistic interpretation of the catastrophic air quality in Delhi, Kaalchakra, a giant woven colourful installation resembling an interconnected galaxy, points to both the problem and the solution in its whirling contours of colours. Gupta first made the dye from the ink, eventually using it on the yarns. “We need to innovate and experiment to understand what should be the future of textiles too,” says Gupta, who exhibited a saree using the dye made from Air-Ink for the first time at London’s Design Museum last year. “It was called Pollution Saree,” he adds. “If we can find solutions to the day-to-day problems of people, it would help us for a sustainable future.”
Organised by Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a Delhi-based sustainability think-tank, with artists Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, Sustaina India (February 2-15) has brought together scientists and artists to create a new language about the urgency of tackling climate change. Three emerging artists, whose works relate to grassroots interventions, were selected by CEEW and a jury that included Thukral and Tagra, for a five-month fellowship to fund projects that contribute to the conversation around climate action and sustainability. The works of the three artist-fellows—Debasmita Ghosh, Manjot Kaur, and Rachna Toshniwal—and those of seven others invited to join from across the country, make up the exhibition.
“Eight out of ten Indians are living in areas that are vulnerable to extreme climate events like floods, droughts, cyclones and associated events,” says CEEW founder and CEO Arunabha Ghosh. “This is something that is happening to us now, it’s not something far away. But at the same time, there is resilience as well, whether you’re trying to reduce loss of life, or you’re trying to improve livelihoods through distributed renewable energy, or you’re scaling up clean infrastructure,” adds Ghosh. “The climate is already changing. How we are impacting the planet and how the planet is impacting us is part of this duality that we have to experience.”
Sustaina India is aiming to use art as a tool in the middle of facts of science to raise awareness and provoke thinking in the battle for the planet’s survival. “I think the point here is that it would be a false dichotomy to say science is somewhere and art is somewhere, because together, it is a lived experience,” explains Ghosh. “That’s where we thought that creating a fellowship, where artists understand the science, and the science also feeds back in the way how they express it in their artform, was a way to bring this narrative, and bring these stories to the front, and provoke us to think,” he adds.
Living with the Land, Kolkata-born architect Debasmita Ghosh’s installation at the exhibition, reflects the traditions of the Khond tribal community in Odisha’s Rayagada district and the shifting patterns of traditional mud houses that suffer from the infusion of modern materials like cement and asbestos. “It was not only about the home, but the change affects all aspects of the lives of the indigenous Adivasi community,” says Ghosh, who first met the Khond community members five years ago before deciding to live among them. Mumbai-based artist Rachna Toshniwal’s installation, There is No Such Thing Called Waste, has built a giant tapestry using waste material collected from Alibaug near Mumbai. Working with 20 women from the fishing community in the coastal area, Toshniwal gathered waste that washed up on the Saarai beach in Alibaug to probe the role of human beings as co-creators of material. Miniature models of shrimp and turtle made with thread created from waste forming the giant tapestry in the exhibition points to restoring dignity to women as contributors to society.
Chandigarh-born artist Manjot Kaur’s The Parliament of Forests, a multimedia installation, too, explores the sovereignty of women’s bodies and ecology. “The installation is about finding out what rights belong to the forest as a person,” says Kaur, an alumnus of Chandigarh University. “It is a philosophy of understanding how much resources human beings extract from nature without considering what impact it would have on us and our future generations,” adds Kaur, who divides her time between Chandigarh and Vancouver, Canada.
Curated by Jiten Thukral, Sumir Tagra and Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, the exhibition suggests changing course for the conversation around climate change and sustainability through storytelling to include a wider audience. Artist Pallov Saikia, whose Rahmaria Archive is part of the exhibition, documents the floods that are threatening his own village, Rahmaria in Dibrugarh district of Assam, through five photographs that explore the relationship between its history and culture. In Particles of a Cloud, sound artist Bhaskar Rao uses field recording in Bir, Himachal Pradesh, to interpret soundscapes as a living heritage.
The artworks are extending the frontiers of knowledge to help redraw boundaries and imagine new ways of action. “If you look at the Khond community, on the one hand, their houses are changing from traditional material to modern because of repeated rainfall and others weathering down their mud-based walls. On the other hand, the houses are becoming warmer,” says CEEW’s Ghosh. “So, the art itself then triggers thoughts about, let’s say, doing research on what is the passive architecture that can reduce heat load, while making them more resilient against climate extremes. That’s how these provocations help us also to ask those questions on the research front.”