Oceanic ecologies

Akanksha Maglani Assistant Professor, Jindal School of Art and Architecture, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat in conversation with Devika Sundar, Artist and Kamini Rao, Designer, Bengaluru

‘Bodies at Sea’ is an archival exhibition curated by artist Devika Sundar in collaboration with designer Kamini Rao of Studio Slip at the National Centre of Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore. The exhibition was a response to NCBS archives’ third Open Call for exhibition proposals titled ‘Bound-aries’ (https://archives.ncbs.res.in/boundaries). The year-long project featuring a multidisciplinary range of works, draws parallels between the human body and oceanic forms. It opened to the public on 18 March 2022 and was on view till December 2022.

Excerpt from the curatorial note: ‘In “Bodies at Sea” we traverse the boundaries between the visible and unknown, examining the hidden complexity of our interior bodies alongside oceanic bodies of the deep sea. Through our explorations, we search and discover an uncanny, affectual and visual synergy between internal bodyscapes to marine forms and aquatic environments. Responding to a collection of visual, textual, material and audio archives across medical and marine journals and databases – we particularly trace layers that lie invisible, curious, obscure and yet to be unearthed in these mirroring environments.’

Read more about the exhibition at https://www.devikasundar.com/ncbsbodies-at-sea

The artist and designer duo Devika Sundar and Kamini Rao, referred to this exhibition as an ‘artistic interpretation of a scientific archive’. In my conversations with the duo my attention was drawn to the simple candid ways in which they described the exhibition, ‘we were designing for people’ they kept reminding me. The exhibition is a coming together of complex disciplinary and conceptual ecologies thoughtfully crafted for public interpretation. ‘Bodies at Sea’ is one of the few exhibitions I’ve come across which is not white walls with artworks hanging on them, it instead features deep blue walls, clinical light boxes blinking and visitors submerged in this ‘medical lab and aquarium’ like atmosphere, sitting immersed in the multitude of experiences on display in this small space. And so a conversation seemed like an appropriate medium to understand the lesser known intricacies, distinct process and personal thought behind the scenes of this poetic and immersive experience. This excerpt from a larger conversation is my attempt at a deeper engagement with the under-examined intersections of art, design, archives and the public, which lie within the process of making an exhibition.

Akanksha Maglani: The theme for 2021 NCBS open call for exhibition proposals was ’Boundaries’ Can you take us through your initial proposal and how you interpreted the theme into what became ‘Bodies at Sea’?

Devika Sundar: The open call asked for a team which can transform the space completely. The NCBS Archives is a small space and they asked us to do whatever we saw fit with the space and we really wanted to work on something that was experiential and immersive. The theme ‘Boundaries’ could be interpreted in any way. It did, however, require that we have archives that would cross fields of science, art history, literature, and so forth and that at least one of the archival record should be from the NCBS archival collection along with material from different archives, institutions and libraries, as well as artists who have explored the themes that we were studying. So we really just started with words that come to our mind when thinking about the word ‘Boundaries’.

I was also interested in seeing as an artist how I could intersect my practice into the exhibition. And so when I took this idea of boundaries, within my own work one thing that came up was the sense of the seen versus the unseen. And since I work with a lot of medical imagery, which can be quite sterile and clinical, and the idea of the body is a very definite form. But I’m trying to kind of explore the ambiguous, the invisible kind of murky relationships we have with our bodies, and a physicality that isn’t visible . I was also creating these forms that had this very aqueous kind of marine-like form to them. For the proposal we just pulled together images from different research databases on the internet exploring the visual synergy we found between bodily forms to textures, shapes and forms within oceanic environments.. We were looking for relationships between humans and sea, and the deeper connections between these two mirroring kinds of bodies.

Because of the pandemic we were working through the NCBS digital archive, and we started with just plugging in words into the digital archive, and making a shot in the dark. Since we were exploring the relationship between the body and the ocean I remember putting in words like ‘sea’ and ‘marine’ and an exciting story that came up on K.S. Krishnan, a celebrated scientist in NCBS. He had conducted an interesting study on ‘predatorial toxins released by cone snails along the coast of Tamil Nadu’ and the potential of these toxins in having medicinal, therapeutic, and pharmacological benefits. So we started with K.S. Krishnan and my work, from there it was just like a process of pulling different threads.

Akanksha Maglani: I’ve started this piece with an excerpt from the curatorial note, that I’d like to read to you as well: ‘Through the explorations, the curated artists searched for and discovered an uncanny, effectual and visual synergy between internal bodyscapes Marine forms and aquatic environments responding to a collection of visual, textual material and audio archives, across medical and medical journals, and database, the work traces left that lie invisible, curious, obscure and yet to be unearthed in these mirroring environments.’ Can you speak to the role of visual and sensory elements in the exhibition such as the use of sound video and installation, in contrast, especially with K.S. Krishnan’s work?

Kamini Rao: We wanted to engage the audience in a multi-sensory way. We wanted audio-visual elements and light boxes. We wanted to make it almost feel like you’re in between a laboratory or an aquarium and you don’t know if you are the body at sea, or if you’re looking at bodies at sea. So the whole space was painted in this deep blue colour and, the sound scape was some audio recordings of the ocean and some were actually sounds of the MRI scan machine. And especially because it’s a small space, if you go there on your own, you feel like you’re submerged. We also knew we wanted people to inspect, search and trace their thoughts through the exhibition. So the exhibition itself was very subtle, light boxes that would blink to look like sonar signals to guide the visitor from one section to another. We had a whole space where we set up a little guessing game, ‘is it body or is it sea?’ We used the visual synergy of the forms in photographer Umeed Mistry’s micro images of different parts of the ocean, and coral, alongside micro images of the human body from different archives. The visitor had to take it off the wall, and put it on a lightbox to decide if it’s body or sea. The idea also came from Devika’s previous body of work which had these light boxes. And we extended that technique to other artists like Rohan Chakravarty’s images were displayed in light boxes as well. It gave the space a glowing and immersive feeling.

K.S. Krishnan’s archive was very tangible, we used his original letters, and we used his collection of cone snail shells, a calendar, maps of the collection sites, letters between him and his colleagues about the process of the study, and there were the snail shells that were displayed in vitrines.

Devika Sundar: As Kamini said, from the beginning we wanted the space to be at the intersection of a medical screening room or a lab and an aquarium. And the kind of images that come to mind is transparency, glass, looking through, these concealed spaces. I think a large part of the process itself of the exhibition was these two vastly obscure, murky environments of a medical lab and an aquarium. And as the curators of the exhibition, we were trying to uncover, detect, trace, shift through to understand the two bodies, more deeply. And so wanted the viewer to also take on a similar role, where it’s not just a white cube space where you’re staring at a wall, but you’re actually flipping pages in a journal pulling out slides, placing it on the light box, like a doctor taking a scan and placing it against the light, to read it. We wanted the viewer to mimic that kind of performative action of detection and movement. In a dark room with lights blinking. Kamini mentioned Rohan Chakravarty, he is a photographer, who took these very interesting images of creatures on the other side of an aquarium glass, exploring the voyeuristic nature of looking at these creatures from behind the glass. To give it a tactile structure we took his photographs and presented them within a lightbox.

Akanksha Maglani: The exhibition brought together a range of multidisciplinary/multisensory practices and works. What was the research process like, how did you come across their work, what kind of work was on display?

Devika Sundar: The research process began with a lot of plugging in keywords across different databases and talking to friends and colleagues to discover different ideas, practices and people. I spoke to Veerangna who is a curator and she told me about these practitioners of Dulam, the ancient, now-endangered art of fish listening, where they go deep below the surface of the water and collect these Sonic archives. And so this was an audio essay. Because especially when you’re talking about the idea of invisibility, and the body and the ocean, there is in both these bodies, an element of Sonic detection. When you go through a scan you hear sounds of medical instruments, and then hydrophones that are put under the ocean to understand life and movement within these Sonic archives we come across other artists. So it was a lot of connecting these vastly very different practices. We wanted the exhibition to be poetic, almost like an essay with a beginning and an end curated with these three themes hiding in the deep, tracing and mirroring bodies. We had visual artists, writers, anthropologists, Sonic artists, poets, there were so many different practices going on.

Kamini Rao: I just want to add that usually, for this exhibition, we wouldn’t have had a whole year. We would have had one month to write the proposal, and then we would have had three months to research the archives, and prepare the exhibition. But, because we were in the middle of Covid, we had a lot more time to dive into these rabbit holes, and get lost in this entirely new world. It was great but the extra time meant we had too much information to sort through, and many possible tangents to explore. But the good thing was that we had a clear vision and budget along with space. Another nice thing about the Open Call was working with the team at NCBS, we got to do something quite unique and broad minded because we were able to plug in lots of people’s ideas. For instance, one of our interns who is passionate about poetry brought in that tangent and Mr. Venkat (Head of the archive) would also share resources and content for us to explore and incorporate.

Akanksha Maglani: The exhibition is immersive not just spatially but also sensorially. How did you break away from the ‘do not touch’ in exhibition spaces and make it hands-on and accessible?

Kamini Rao: We wanted it to be a very interactive space, we wanted it to be tangible and most importantly accessible. For instance, although we didn’t have the space for Kannada translations throughout, so we made sure the curatorial note was bilingual, the font size was accessible to all, the heights were accessible, we wanted to have two or three seating areas to make sure that people could engage with the content comfortably. The location of the space within a government institution and next to the actual NCBS archive ensured that we were extra careful with the design and construction of the exhibition. We budgeted for last minute breaks and cracks, we conducted structural testing before we opened to the public. Also while the visitors could physically interact with most of the exhibitions we did have vitrines for the more fragile objects. Structurally it was also designed keeping in mind kids groups between age seven to nine if they want to kick, pull or do anything.

Devika Sundar: We were curating for an educational institution, which is open to the public, which means science students and also campus visitors would be seeing it. We wanted to make the language simple, we didn’t want it to be hyper intellectualized. We wanted it to be poetic, and still be beautiful in the language. That is also where the idea of painting the space blue created a speculative space that was playful that wasn’t trying to be very high art. I think the collaborators also did really shape the exhibition.

Kamini Rao: There was something for everyone who went on a quiet day on their own, had a completely different experience to the people who came for an event. And so if you did visit space alone you could spend hours going through the diversity of long form content like Sonic and audio essays, an old five-page long research paper by shellfish biologist and so on and so forth. And there were people that actually sat and went through everything, I’d also say the space also changed through the day. We printed high resolution scans of Devika’s beautiful watercolour artworks on sticker paper and plastered the clerestory windows of this basement exhibition room. So depending on the day or time of day that you were visiting, the space actually did sort of change

Akanksha Maglani: When we hear the word archive, the image associated with it is a badly lit room with rows of dust filled storage and yellowing paper. But NCBS with their open call every year really open up the archive. It allows for the shifting of the meaning of an archive to go beyond just information and scientific record. How did you bring in this personal aspect of meaning(-making?) into the exhibition?

Devika Sundar: At the opening event we could allow only small batches of people into the exhibition space. So we set up two parallel tours, one of the exhibition and the other of the NCBS archive space. This allowed people to see the archive space itself, find out about archives’ work, the type of collections. And interestingly the NCBS, archives, encompasses not only scientific records but also institutional records along with personal correspondence from scholars, photo archives and so much more. Take for instance K.S. Krishnan’s work that we included in the exhibition. Keeping the intent of the exhibition in mind, we included not just records of K.S. Krishnan’s study but we wove the narrative through letters like one where he was writing to a fishery community to get permission to dig through trash to find cone snails, we were interested in the excitement in his letters, the emotion that you could feel from his correspondence with other colleagues, there were handwritten notes on the progress of testing. We also included a picture of the field site itself with him just smiling holding a big bag of snail shells.

Kamini Rao: I think the fact that they have this open call every year, and they’re seeking out different people is a really good initiative. Between the both of us, we had an art community and an architecture community that came into this space who now know about the archive being public, being available. And so every year they choose, completely different team of people and they’re so open minded, allowing you to be as ambitious as you want to be. Another good thing about our exhibition was we got to choose a piece that then went into the archive’s collection.

Devika Sundar: Through these open calls, what NCBS is trying to do is invite people from the public to come and reinterpret these institutional archives, opening them up to new ways of looking. It is a very exciting project that allows for multiple entry points, opening up a very interdisciplinary public space.

Note : The NCBS archive is open to the public, you can access the digital catalogue on their website: https://catalogue.archives.ncbs.res.in

To read more about Devika Sundar’s practices: https://www.devikasundar.com/bio

To read more about Kamini Rao’s practice: https://studioslip.com/home