Time travellers: Ancestral Futures at Gallery Espace

Founded in 1989, Gallery Espace celebrates its 35th anniversary this year with a bouquet of exhibitions, including Ancestral Futures by Swiss curator Damian Christinger. The show draws a line between the notion of the past and the future and the role of ancestral and Indigenous knowledge in making this connection. “The concept of 'ancestral futures' intertwines the past, present and future, positing that ancestral histories profoundly influence our understanding of time and identity,” Christinger says in a curatorial note. The exhibition is on view from October 19 – December 12, 2024, at Gallery Espace in New Delhi.

Ancestral Futures also considers the gallery’s history; the Indian artist MF Husain was an early collaborator and the subject of its first exhibition, which featured self-portraits by Husain. Christinger invited a group of artists to reimagine the poster from this 1989 exhibition, prominently featuring its logo, a galloping horse, also designed by Husain. Some offer minor departures from the poster, inserting themselves into it to comment on Husain’s omnipresence: “you know who I am”, one reimagined poster declares. Others take it apart – Uzma Mohsin cuts up the poster and splices sections of it back together with other images, including close-ups of a horse’s body parts, with Husain’s head making an appearance in the collage.

An iteration by Ashish Sahoo superimposes images of a woman costumed as Gaja Gamini, the protagonist from Husain’s eponymous film starring Bollywood actor Madhuri Dixit. In Sahoo’s collage, the woman poses with a cloth bundle, resting a foot on it, delicately off balance as her hip sways to one side, only occasionally confronting the camera with a direct gaze. Sahoo’s preoccupation with gesture and stance extends in the project space upstairs with Narrative Flux, a series of pigment prints featuring performers wearing masks from Seraikella Chau, a martial performance practice from eastern India. They are photographed from unlikely angles: a headless performer photographed torso down, holding a wooden cane, another masked performer in profile, folds of flesh bunched over their ribs as they kneel on the floor. The performers are not ‘posing’ in the traditional sense, arriving at the end of a gesture or stance to make for photographs that convey the aesthetic of the form. Yet there is a completeness to their stance–they gesture to their own incongruity, allowing the viewer to build a story across the images.

The same project space also showcases Arunkumar HG’s lenticular prints, which illustrate the impact of environmental breakdown in India’s western ghats. Blue-green forests disappear into barren craters, trees shed their leaves and are reduced to dark, stubby stumps as you walk from left to right. A compilation of newspaper cutouts, bound into a heavy scrapbook, chronicles the irreversible damage—forests decimated as roads are built through them, land appropriated for industrial zones– accompanied by the slow creep of climate change.

We owe our contemporaneity to ‘progress’, yet it also brings unintended consequences. Ravi Agarwal’s photographic transparencies document a now-defunct coal power plant, its walls green with age as its mammoth machines lie silent, their disuse magnified by how they take up space. In contradiction to its climate goals, India continues to increase coal production; the fossil fuel accounts for over a third of its CO2 emissions.

Climate change is a looming presence in many of the works in Ancestral Futures, both in the devastation it catalogues and in the exhibition’s turn to ‘climate conscious’ modes of existence, in learning from Indigenous traditions and the practices of climate-vulnerable communities. In Swiss artist Ursula Biemann’s video installation Forest Mind, a man describes his experience of consuming the psychoactive plant ayahuasca or yagé in a spiritual ceremony. Mother Earth spoke to him, he tells his audience, sitting amid the lush Amazon rainforest in Colombia, leading him through a series of actions and casting him back out to a completely forested earth, with clean air and no pollution. “Protected, totally pure. Trees move, trees talk. They are alive,” he tells us. Ancestral Futures, then, calls for its audience to consider the ways in which mystical and material understandings of our ecologies collide.

Ancestral Futures is on view from October 19 – December 12, 2024, at Gallery Espace, New Delhi.