Just before lockdown, I was working on a curatorial project titled, The Laboratory of Time, which has now been postponed to 2022. Naturally, when I was asked to curate for RCA2020, I was thrilled at the prospect of acquainting myself with so many brilliant minds. Several friends, who are now successful practicing artists, graduated from the college.

Looking across the School of Arts & Humanities, I was particularly drawn to the work of artists working in the department of photography. Conceptual photography has always been of interest to me curatorially; specially practices that are interdisciplinary in nature and pose questions rather than offer answers. The overlapping and clashing terrains of aesthetics and politics as well as of materiality and fantasy create an indeterminacy, which fascinates me. Art should enable an unsettled ground, a discomfort, an otherness.

Given our estranged relationship with nature and non-human sentience, it felt timely to put together a group of artists (alongside writer Fiona Glen) to ruminate on human agency, the opacity of human understanding (wonderfully symbolised through Alexander Mourant’s glass house), anxiety and intimacy.

With my background in Buddhist studies, I am deeply aware of the interconnectedness of all life; wherein a non-hierarchical and symbiotic structuring principle guides all manifestation.

Sandhini Poddar