Contributions by:

In this exhibition, Baroda based artist Sudipta Das interrogates the realities of climate change and appeals to humanity about its most important outcomes, human migration. Through her paper sculptures Sudipta represents the slow violence of ongoing disasters specific to her hometown Silchar, Assam and the precarious pasts and futures of its victims. Nonetheless, the miniaturized representation of the human exodus, repeating in an endless loop reckons the universal emergency of human displacement more than at any point in human history. Her immersive installations of these miniaturized human figures and sculptures are influenced by personal experiences, archival materials and family histories to conjure an eternal journey in search of home, depict the painful life in exile, and introduce an existential dilemma of unparalleled scale. Sudipta’s use of paper and the fragility of this medium catalyses an important discussion towards the precarious condition of climate change refugees, especially in the context of recent constitutional changes set by Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens and the demand for kagaz or documents. This exhibition arrives at a crucial time when the word refugee has become a polarizing term in international politics and at the national level the current political action could exacerbate the conditions of millions of vulnerable lives rendering them disenfranchised. Sudipta’s representations of the victims of climate disaster attempts to strike the collective conscious and plea to the empathy of the viewers. This immersive exodus of eternal wanderers speaks to our sense of justice to the precarious lives and asks us to imagine a politics of asylum.