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Ravi Agarwal
is represented in the 2nd Yinchuan
Biennale, curated by Marco Scotini with curatorial team of Andris Brinkmanis,
Paolo Caffoni, Zasha Colah and Lu Xinghua.
Installations using photographs, videos, diaries and text.
Ravi
Agarwal presents two separate and interconnected bodies of work: The Room of
the Seas and The Room of the Sands. The latter has been completed as a new
commission for the Biennale.
Both the bodies of work emerge from his long
engagements with two landscapes – the desert and the sea. They are
investigations of ways in which ecological landscapes are produced and
inhabited as a set of complex interrelationships. They propose affective
ways in which nature is lived and shaped from the ground up, as politics,
identity, memory, language, food, values, culture and livelihood, as a means
to explore diverse questions which inhabit an ecological space.
The Room of the Seas
delves into multiple ways in which a local Tamil fisherman lives with the
sea and its current changes of depleting fish stock, receding beaches,
tourism and the changing coast line. Through an evocation of ancient Sangam
Tamil landscape poetry, the works suggest an alternative relationship with
nature.
The Room of the Sands
traverses a personal memory of a desert homeland in a now
abandoned ancestral home. Pointing towards the loss of the local leading to
the breakdown of ecological constructs of identity, food systems, water, and
land, the terrain is now increasingly barren and infertile, as a ground for
new industrial mining.
Ravi Agarwal
is a photographer artist, writer, curator and environmental activist. He
explores issues of urban space, ecology and capital in an interrelated ways
working with photographs, video, performance, on-site installations and
public art. Agarwal has participated in several international shows
including documenta XI (Kassel 2002), Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013);
‘Zones of Contact: Propositions on the Museum’, co-curated by Vidya Shivadas,
Akansha Rastogi, Deeksha Nath, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Noida, 2013;
‘The Needle on the Gauge: The Testimonial Image in the works of
Seven Indian Artists’, curated by Ranjit Hoskote, Contemporary Art Centre
of SA, Adelaide, Australia, 2012; ‘Newtopia’, curated by Katerina
Gregos, various Museum venues, Mechelen, Belgium, 2012; ‘Critical
Mass, Contemporary Art from India’, curated by Tami
Katz-Freiman and Rotem
Ruff,
Tel Aviv Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel, 2012; ‘Z.N.E!, Examples to
Follow’, curated by Adrienne Goehler, traveling exhibition, Berlin,
Mumbai, Adis Ababba, Beijing; ‘Horn Please,’ Kunstmuseum, Bern, 2007, curated
by Bernhard
Fibicher and Suman Gopinath; ‘Indian Highway’ 2009 , Serpentine Gallery,
curated byJulia
Peyton-Jones, Hans Ulrich Obrist ;
‘Generation in Transition: New Art from India,’ Zacketa National Gallery of
Art, Warsaw, Poland, and Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania
curated by Magda Kardasz; ‘The Eye is a Lonely Hunter: Images of
Humankind,’ at Fotofestival Mannheim_ludwigshafen_Heidelberg, curated
by Katerina Gregos and Solvej Helweg Ovesen; ‘After the Crash’ at Museo
Orto Botanico, Rome. His recent solo shows being ‘Of Value and Labour’, at
The Guild, Mumbai, 2011; ‘Flux: Dystopia, Utopia, Heterotopia,’ Gallery
Espace, New Delhi. Agarwal recently co-curated a twin city public art
project, Yamuna-Elbe.Public.Art.Outreach. He writes extensively on
ecological issues, and is also founder of the leading Indian environmental
NGO, Toxics Link. He is an engineer by training.
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