2022 Artists

“We must change almost everything in our current societies.
The bigger your carbon footprint - the bigger your moral duty.
The bigger your platform - the bigger your responsibility.
Adults keep saying: 'We owe it to the young people to give them hope.'
But I don't want your hope.
I don't want you to be hopeful.
I want you to panic.
I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.
And then I want you to act.
I want you to act as you would in a crisis.
I want you to act as if our house is on fire.
Because it is.”

-Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

Devastation. It is all around us. Every morning we wake up, we read of another natural disaster that has wrought havoc among populations. Somewhere there is an earthquake where thousands have died. Elsewhere, there are torrential rains and floods that have left thousands homeless. In another part of the world, droughts have become widespread, so that few millions face the prospect of unrelenting food shortages and hunger. Everywhere, climate disasters and cataclysmic disruptions have become a common occurrence.

In the near future, countries will experience the terrible consequences of climate change with serious disruptions to the planet’s natural environment and severe adverse effects on human populations, including flooding, droughts, heat waves, shortages of water and food, warming oceans, storms, rising sea levels, wildfires, melting glaciers and polar ice caps.

Climate change and the disasters it will bring in its wake are no longer something we can wish away, or afford to ignore. Scientific evidence and findings on human-induced climate change and its far-reaching effects worldwide are clear, unequivocal, and disturbing.

Environmental scientists, naturalists, and concerned citizens, including young activists, worldwide, continue to warn that human-induced climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people and are calling for immediate action. Ecosystems and populations least able to cope are expected to be hardest hit by the consequences of climate change. In particular, the vulnerable and the poor will be worse affected.

Governments have been warned that the future habitability of planet earth depends on immediate, large-scale action in no less than six critical and interrelated areas: energy, short-lived pollutants, nature, food, economy, and population.

Their recommended actions include limiting the burning of fossil fuels, restoring ecosystems, moving to plant-based diets, curtailing consumption and stabilizing world population.

However, most of the recommended actions are largely unappealing to governments and businesses. Transitioning from burning fossil fuels to renewable energy, for example, is considered a difficult task. Global greenhouse gas emissions are broadly from energy, agriculture, industry, and waste, with almost three-quarters from energy consumption.

The alternatives to fossil fuels are not readily available to meet the rising global demand for electricity. Some progress has recently been achieved moving from meat to a plant-based diet. However, curtailing consumption, or shrinking the economy, is not likely to be embraced by most populations any time soon.

Also, attempts to stabilize populations are anathema to governments, businesses, and others. They believe that demographic growth is essential for economic growth, political power, and national identity. Consequently, rather than stabilization, world population is expected to increase from 8 billion today to 10 billion by around mid-century.

All these clearly show us that there is not much of a planet that will remain for future generations. They point to an earth that is empty, devasted and lonely. A time when there are no trees, when animals have perished and humans themselves, despair in their eyes, wander around an earth that looks surreal, like a Dali landscape.

Alarm bells should be ringing everywhere. Our first warning was in fact the Covid virus that was transmitted through bats that scientists now believe moved out of their habitat because of deforestation. Humans were so terrified that they scurried into their rabbit-hole-like homes, too afraid even to breathe. They swore in their zeal to take responsibility for the ways they lived and consumed, promising to be more conscious of the world around them.

And in that devastation caused by the pandemic, curator Sayam Bharath Yadav and his fellow artists began to think about the environment that would impact generations to come. “These are emerging artists, some still in college who have been thinking of environmental issues. It’s just that I thought it was time we Hyderabad artists showed our works to raise awareness about the planet,” confides Bharath.

What shrinking forests and lack of oxygen can do is worrying, and concerns many of the artists in the show. In Ramesh Baikani’s installation and paintings there are stunted babies as in the Thalidomide disaster in America which caused the birth of stillborn babies and children with deformities. If his 6ft by 5 ft fiber glass sculpture of a stillborn baby does not bring the viewer to a standstill, imagining a world of stunted and aborted foetuses, then surely, nothing will.

Similarly, both Sabitha Lakshmanan and Uma Vegasina who love nature as much as their own lives, have depicted lungs in humans and nature around them, to emphasize that trees and nature are the lungs of the earth, and these in turn give humans fresh air that their lungs can revel in. In a telling canvas, Uma depicts herself in a floral shirt where she allows herself to inhale the freshest and purest form of oxygen. There is no future for us or our children unless we respect nature that predates us, Sabita says, and her drawings are a celebration of the memory of the time spent in nature. “The time I spend in painting is a way of deeply connecting with the shared environment…the trees, the flowers, the berries, the fruits, their fragrances in the air and the remembered calls of the birds, the bulbuls and the magpies...” she says wistfully.

Another woman artist, Harsha Kanchala’s installation that greets you at the very door is not of soothing marigolds and roses, but of cloth masks that have now become part of our psyche. There is a sense of urgency as she puts these nearly 2000 cloth masks that she gave around at local schools and asked children to write their deepest wishes for the planet that they will inherit. Some of these messages and drawings are heartfelt pleas from the young to stop ozone depletion and deforestation so that they may wake up to a healthier planet.

The rapid urbanization and migration from villages to cities has caused other problems of overcrowding, and these occupy Bharath’s mind: in his massive installation, he depicts a bullock cart from his rural memory that is burdened and overladen with a concrete jungle. Is urbanization diminishing the idyllic dream of a rural life, he seems to ask through his work. Mahesh Pottabathini who hails from a weaving community in Telangana also dreams of a bygone time when each home had a loom and wove their own cloth thus being self-sufficient. Even while memories of farmer deaths caused by droughts haunt his works, he also depicts a couple, probably his own parents from a time gone by, in a self-sufficient rural economy that the great environmentalist and advocate of sustainable rural economies -- Gandhi once thought was ideal for India.

There are also videos and photographs in the show that raise concerns of pollution and depleting water resources. One of the concerns of global warming are green house emissions and so much of it comes from what we consume. Photographer Sharath Mudupu who hails from the farming community is still haunted by the way the fields that were once irrigated by water conduits now run empty and the clouds only wait for rains.

While technology and its benefits are inevitable, the waste we generate by discarding old electronic gadgets, cars and batteries is so colossal that there are literally graveyards of old tyres and laptops that no one knows what to do, or cares to do anything about. With obsolescence being high with electronics things are no longer recycled as it was done even a generation ago. Artist Murali Thrigulla who usually paints vintage cars, here has a truck that looks as if it is heading to bomb Ukraine, but is maybe only a vehicle that was repurposed consciously for a different use.

Similarly human being made the bomb believing it would save and protect human kind. But artist Jangaiah Polepogu asks aren’t these weapons in reality annihilating humanity itself With large apes holding little babies, it seems it is nature that will save us, which indeed it will. Similarly Stanley’s abstracts seemingly question the decisions leaders make implying the crisscross of our wiring which does not seem alright at all as rich and powerful nations invade vulnerable countries for no reason at all causing devastation all around!

One of the most haunting, because the message is so clear, is the video installation of artist Jayaprakash, where buffaloes are foraging on the heaps of garbage for food, instead of the grass they are supposed to be chewing on, and the result is milk, whose quality we might want to think about. How healthy is the milk in the chai you are brewing?And what would happen to calves and babies that drink this milk, he seems to pondering.

Certainly, these artists are concerned about the world we are living in. There is that fear and panic. And walking through this show, we too must feel that panic that Greta feels as she travels across the world mobilizing the young, and speaking to governments.

‘I want you to act as if the world is on fire, because it is,’ she says. And we too better panic about the environmental disasters that will engulf us.