Exhibition in Bengaluru sheds light on human’s relationship with earth

Humankind’s approach to earth has almost always been human-centric, pushing the earth to a “critical” stage - a sort of “intensive care”. To reorient human beings’ relationship with the planet, Bengaluru will host a travelling exhibition from ZKM, Centre of Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, titled ‘Critical Zone’ at Science Gallery from February 17 to March 17. This is being held in collaboration with Goethe Institut Max Mueller Bhavan.   

Based on a concept called ‘Thought Exhibition” conceived by French philosopher Bruno Latour and Austrian post-conceptual artist Peter Weibel, the exhibition aims to curate the aesthetic and participatory capacity of the arts to understand the relationship between the earth and the human. 

Critical zone is a term borrowed from the natural sciences. It means a thin layer of the earth which ranges from the atmosphere to a few kilometers down the earth’s crust. However, the use of the term critical zone for the exhibition is to imply the condition of the earth today, at large, while also building a single domain to discuss all forms of life - soil, water, plants, rocks or weather which is associated with earth. 

Speaking at a press preview in the city on Friday, Francesca Romana Audretsch, Art Mediator from Karlsruhe, said that the idea of Critical Zones is to reorient thinking focusing not on theory but on the materiality of coexisting with earth.  “This is a thought exhibition. We do not want people who walk through the exhibition thinking in terms of theoretical matter but conceive thinking as something that is materialized,” she said. 

For a very long time, humans viewed Earth as a dead object. However, the exhibition Critical Zones tries to break out of the anthropocentric by reimagining life forms on Earth from multiple viewpoints. 

According to the curators of the exhibition, describing our relationship with Earth will help us make informed choices while guiding our political and personal decisions.  “Human beings, at least those who live in extractivist societies, struggle to grasp the entanglements of the crisis of perception. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel have always tried to reimagine and reorient differently. It is essential to talk about this crisis of perception and reasoning and not just about climate change. This is about finding new ways of coexisting with all forms of life on earth,” said Francesca.