A few months ago I remember mentioning in this column about how the Earth is now in a new geological age because humankind itself has turned into a major, catastrophic geological force, a force which is surely heading us towards the planet’s collapse and our own eventual extinction. And I could not help but wonder how our shifting understanding of the age we live in is already defining the course of contemporary art. This is a question that must be on the minds of many of us today.

Let’s take another step forward. To a time when the Earth is perhaps no longer habitable, when life for humankind has ceased altogether. Let us stand on that dreary, forlorn landscape and turn back to this time, this Sunday morning in June in the year 2018. If we were to, what would we have changed? It is from this location in time and space that I feel we need to practice and function as artists or curators and do whatever little we can to retrieve our future, at least to some extent. And so when I was asked to co-curate yet another art show for South Asian artists in Kolkata that opened yesterday at Ganges Art Gallery, I thought of memory. For it is memory, or what we build it with and build of it, that defines how we go forward. Am sharing it with you here because I feel the concept is relevant not only across borders in this region, but for the world as a whole. We envisioned the show as a looking back upon the present from a point in the future—‘Small Histories: Memory as Practice, Memory as Ethics’ is a pan-South Asian exhibition that brings together 13 artists from eight countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka). This is the second exhibition in a pioneering series that begun last year in Kolkata with ‘Things Lost/Remembering the Future’. The future is upon us, and possibly its end too. If we ‘will’ look back upon the present from a time when the planet is already destroyed, maybe it ‘will’ be time for us to wonder: Which are the stories we should have told, the histories we should have hung on to, the narratives we should have created and rejoiced in. ‘Small Histories: Memory as Practice, Memory as Ethics’ is a small effort to launch that practice in a regional context. Past violence, pain and trauma is a trinity we live with and engender on a daily basis. While it is good to critique the present and judge the past, it is perhaps more important given the state of the planet, that we take a committed look as artists into the past and the present from an unforeseen future scenario and judge ourselves, and our actions and then act responsibly. This particular gathering of artists explore the ethics of personal memory from the perspective of ‘repetition’, which is a pathological form of remembering. This has either branched out into the idea of identity based on difference, or on violent, historicized othering, or a strongly gendered location. Some of the artists are globally established names, while others have received perhaps less exposure. Our aim is to bring together those rare, incisive voices that are consciously commenting on, critiquing and resisting the mainstream idea of the region’s history.’

Nepal’s very own Ashmina Ranjit is a part of the artist line-up, with her installation ‘Feminine Force—Celebration of Womanhood’ (2010) through which she examines how women deal with menstrual blood. ‘Menstruation is a natural phenomenon without which creation would come to a standstill… a complete full stop! I’m interested in examining how women deal with menstrual blood—physically, biologically, chemically, psychologically, religiously, socially—and in the patriarchal society, how one looks upon blood politically. I seek to understand, express and visualise the strong emotions stirred by flowing blood along with the fears associated with it. While reformulating social, cultural, religious and tantric symbols into a universal language of art, I seek to bring forth the feminine force and to reclaim the natural cycle as a matter of celebration,’ she says. Building memories is becoming more and more an ethical gesture for it is our long term cultural memory that is set to define the future we build for ourselves. And Ashmina’s work fits in majestically.

The other artist we, ie me and Amritah Sen, would have loved to have showcased at ‘Small Histories: Memory as Practice, Memory as Ethics’ is Sujan Dangol. However, the video piece that he has been researching at the border of Myanmar and Bangladesh is still in process. I first came across his work during the Kathmandu Triennale held earlier this year, which ostensibly looked like a recording of a game of musical chairs played by a group of young men. The label tersely said that it was ‘a collaboration between the artist and a group of urban refugees living in the Kathmandu Valley’ and that it was a metaphor for their harsh reality. Quietly tucked away in the second floor of the Nepal Art Council, the work came across as intriguing but not particularly compelling. But I later visited his exhibition of drawings ‘Displaced’ at Yala Mandala and could not but be impressed by his commitment to the cause of suffering refugees. The video piece he is making now is an expansion on the same. What drives him to create pieces that draw focus on and give voice to refuge seekers, especially the ‘rohingya’, is their lack of a right to belong anywhere.

Poverty and suffering is not exclusive to people fleeing their homes and seeking refuge in strange lands. But losing the right to belong to a homeland is. And it is this physical truncating of access to one’s past and future that, for me, acts as a symbol of what we are trying to draw attention to through exhibitions like ‘Small Histories’ and ‘Things Lost/Remembering the Future’. The act of remembering can no longer be left to accident or to political/corporate manipulations. Memory is a tool that humankind needs to reclaim for its own survival and the act of remembering is increasingly becoming an ethical choice in this increasingly amnesic world.