From Forests We Are and Forests We Will Be is an intertwined narrative: it investigates and engages with the future by recognising history. The exhibition starts by situating itself in the present with a video installation from 2023: where an unknown person walks through the landscape of Kolkata with a Banana Plant on their backpack with an animation of an imagined posthuman manifestation.
The ultimate culmination of this journey happens in the following room with an installation that imagines humans merging with flora on one side of the space and with a depiction of the deity Tar Baro on the other side of the room. Tar Baro is a character mentioned by the Bengali author Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay in his seminal novel আরণ্যক (Aranyak), who protects wild bison from being hunted.
Whereas the deity Tar Baro sitting and eating coal on one side portrays the ecological devastation that has occurred because of coal mining in the mineral-rich states of India, the two hybrid-human and plant figures on the other side propose a future of human species on earth. Here, humans become plants as an act of resistance against space
colonialism, which through natural destruction makes earth inhabitable for all. These hybrid creatures have body parts from both the Taro and Banana Plants, two of the most important plants that helped millions of people during the Bengal famine of 1943 to survive.
Between the deity, Tar Baro and the two hybrid-human figures hang an inflatable boat, a tent and the backpack that is visible in the video in the previous room. This structure works as a space of transition for dwelling. It serves as a memorial of the past and the present. Around it, the room is covered with a mural that on the side of Tarbaro contextualises violence and a future of common human and plant evolution.
From Forests We Are and Forests We Will Be is an exhibition made in past, present and future at the same time. It is mesmerised by the vastness of history and accepts it as a never-ending prose made of days, nights, in-betweens, protagonists, antagonists and endless supposed facts. Though one is baffled by the immeasurability of history, the relationship of this exhibition with it is that of a rebel. It constantly lives in future, an
imagined would-be history and finds itself entangled with the question posed by Saidiya Hartman: “How does one commemorate what has yet to arrive?”
Whereas history and the manner it is dictated and remembered have always been subject to exploitation by the power relations of the present, the future on the contrary offers the possibility of constructing a world that challenges, dismantles and counters the propositions offered by both the past and the present. From Forests We Are And Forests We Will Be is an exhibition about what we humans can become.
The exhibition is made in collaboration with: Binita Limbani, Shibyan Halder, Suvojit Roy, Soumik Ghosh, Swagata Bhattacharyya, Santanu Dey, Sourav Das, Sk Atiar Rahaman, Joydip Bagui, Prosenjit Ghosh, Arijit Achariya, Arup Halder, Subradip Ojha, Sujon Ojha, Sumon Ojha, Somansu Ghosh, Joy Malik, Mokai Ali Mallick.
The exhibition is curated by Nuno De Brito Rocha.
Photographs from Marin Ly.