The AgriForum is an ongoing platform hosted by FICA, involving a set of discussants - artists and art collectives - working with the agrarian as a site, seeking to bring together varied critical enquiries, multiple propositions and diverse practices. The Forum began as an online reading group in October 2021, supported by the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation and the Shared Ecologies Program, Shyama Foundatiom.

 The Almanac of Time Hangs in the Brain | Introducing the AgriForum

What does it mean to read a landscape? What does it mean to belong to it?
What necessitates enquiries into the agrarian today?

In the heavy verses of his poem, ‘The Almanac of Time,’ poet Dylan Thomas conveys in dark undertones the inevitabilities of human existence. Each revolution of the earth around the sun, each shift of season, every rolling week is both creatively and destructively construed, carrying the permanence of change and the impermanence of belonging. Known for his lyrical, emotional poetry, Thomas had a keen sense of articulating the effects of time on the human condition, writing extensively about the poesy of ageing and the growth of consciousness that accompanied it. He was also particularly interested in how the anatomy of the human body compared to the universe itself - micro- and macrocosmic entities, swallowing each other whole - and how, if at all, they could learn from each other. The anticipation of inevitability is central to our understanding of the external world, and as we grapple with new forms of uncertainties, we find different ways to accommodate precarity in our lives, imbuing our encounters, ambitions and predictions with an undeterred persistence. How do we make sense of what we experience? Who learns from whom, and how are resistances articulated?

Approaching one such inconceivable expanse, in an attempt to think and behold in some form its reverberations, relevances and reformations, we envisioned the AgriForum as a space for presenting and gathering contemporary enquiries into the agrarian. A forum for artists working with the agrarian across media, form and function, it seeks to encourage processes of sharing and accumulation, drawing into its fray various vocabularies at the intersections of artistic practice and agriculture. FICA outlines the AgriForum as responding to a necessity in the field in its attempt to create a network of locally-rooted practitioners from different locations, inviting them to read and discuss together the concerns they share. Positioning this act of convening within a virtual space of convergence, criticality and dissemination, the AgriForum seeks to amplify socio-political and cultural issues at hand, including but not limited to themes around sustainability, the environment, food security and our relationship to natural resources.

Bringing together a small group of participants who engage with the agrarian through a lens of the artistic, the AgriForum is contextualised by their efforts to express and engage with the political urgencies that imbue the agrarian today. Our participants in this phase of the AgriForum are linked by a powerful commonality in their imaginations of the agrarian, namely one where the nature of the site is challenged and placed outside conventional delimitations and one-dimensional approaches to defining it. Their practices activate indigenous knowledge systems, modes of being, community engagement, collective resistances, farming practices, and ecological perspectives in powerful, reinventive ways. Collaboratively rerouting their own materials, methodologies and experiences, the AgriForum wishes to mould, harness and share conceptual understandings around agriculture and its associated discourses, fostering new tangents of interactions with other interlocutors.

The first phase of the AgriForum was initiated with bimonthly reading sessions led by the FICA team and resource persons, creating a space to read alongside, against, and within—silently, annotatively, and discursively. As a space of convivium, the Forum grew through collective thinking around the agrarian as site and concept, resistance and coevality, material and medium.

Beyond acts of reading, the AgriForum also engaged in acts of assimilation—of sources, archives, responses, and stimuli—laying the groundwork for future phases. Through this process, the Forum sought to pool together material and thought, fostering fertile ground for individual projects and potential collaborations.

The AgriForum worked to examine the intertextuality evident in the participants' practices, exploring new ways to revisit and rethink the material generated. It aimed to engage with critical writing, curatorial approaches, and artistic research while streamlining references to mobilize reflections on the agrarian—as an urgency, a landscape of encounter, and an experience in itself.

In 2022, we designed a public-facing space titled Many Acts of Reading, sited at Vadehra Art Gallery. This ‘reading room of sorts’ assimilated the multitudes that constitute the agrarian as a site, and we invite you to explore with us speculative blueprints of the agrarian, arising from our participants’ current on-site explorations, contexts, instigations and experiences. We were also able to travel Many Acts of Reading to DakshinaChitra Museum in Chennai in September 2023 and to Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa in December 2023.

People involved:

Participants: Anga Art Collective, Ankan Dutta, Arunkumar HG, Blaise Joseph, C F John, Gopa Roy, Gyanwant Yadav, Gram Art Collective, Maksud Ali Mondal, Rashmi Kaleka, Sujit Mallik, Umesh Singh

Team: Vidya Shivadas, Annalisa Mansukhani, Stuti Bhavsar

Resource persons: Sanchayan Ghosh, Dr Sarada Natarjan, Randeep Maddoke, Sopan Joshi, Namita Waikar, Daniel Langthasa, S P Ravi, Ravi Agarwal

Organisations involved:

The Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (SSAF) was established in 2016 with the mandate to carry forward the legacy of scholar and photographer Umrao Singh Sher-Gil; his daughter and a pioneering figure of modern Indian art Amrita Sher-Gil; and her nephew and niece, artist Vivan Sundaram and filmmaker and television journalist Navina Sundaram. SSAF’s mandate is to support and enable conjunctions of artistic and cultural practice, that deal with historical memory and to build expectations for the future, based on secular principles and freedom of expression. SSAF is committed to advancing creative independence and supporting alternative and heterodox practices, through a range of projects, grants and publications. The SSAF Lab was set up as an incubatory space for discursive, processual and experimental strategies of practice. It lends itself to interdisciplinary dialogue through multiple formats, such as workshops, talks, symposiums and screenings, that further the objectives of SSAF.

Shared Ecologies is a program by the Shyama Foundation supporting initiatives at the intersection of art and ecology – through critical, creative, aesthetic approaches, and collaborations with various disciplines and knowledge systems. Through grants, programmes, and conversations, we aim to facilitate a regional and international ecology of individuals, practitioners and institutions, who share overlapping concerns, philosophies and methodologies.