Many Acts of Reading | Critical Reflections on the Agrarian
A display in conjunction with the AgriForum

Beginning in October 2021, Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) initiated the AgriForum as a space for presenting and gathering contemporary enquiries into the agrarian, in an attempt to think and behold in some form the reverberations, relevances and reformations of this inconceivable expanse. The programme was organised in collaboration with Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation and with support from Shared Ecologies Program, Shyama Foundation.

In its first phase spanning nine months, the AgriForum took shape as an online reading group that brought together 12 artists working with the agrarian across media, form and function. The participating artists were linked by a powerful commonality in their imaginations of the agrarian, namely one where the nature of the agrarian as a site is challenged and placed outside one-dimensional approaches to defining it.

Through this mode of reading together, we outlined the AgriForum as responding to a necessity in the field, creating a network of locally-rooted practitioners from different locations, inviting them to converge around the concerns they shared. We explored accumulations and annotations, identifying vocabularies at the intersections of artistic practice and agriculture; we sought to also amplify socio-political and cultural issues at hand, including but not limited to themes around ecologies and the environment, sustainable futures, oralities and indigenous knowledges, material histories and other inheritances as well as our relationship to natural resources. A space of convivium, the AgriForum became a route to harnessing conceptual understandings around agriculture and its associated discourses, fostering new tangents of interactions with other interlocutors.

These ongoing enquiries, stemming from a 9-month gestation, now find their way into a public-facing space titled Many Acts of Reading, sited at Vadehra Art Gallery. This reading room of sorts assimilates 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. Taking forward our focus on processes, materials and methodologies, Many Acts of Reading gathers the cross-pollinations and translations that we have been privy to as part of the AgriForum and looks at expanded formats of contemplating the dimensions of the agrarian through artistic enquiry and research.

The contributions here take many forms—processual, intermediary, complete, exact, imaginative, reflective, durational—and are ways and means of reading alongside different practices and pursuits around the agrarian as a landscape of encounter, as resistance and coevality, and as a topography of belonging and fermentation.

Growth intends to possibilitate; growing is inclined to experimentation; the field resides as both site and unfolding situation—how is it read? How is it galvanised? Many Acts of Reading speaks to the intertextual nature of how the agrarian is mapped and preserved, and how we—as observers, custodians, mediators—dialogue with its immensities.

We planned several events in conjunction with AgriForum practitioners as well as other resource persons.

The list of readings assimilated as part of this forum can be accessed here.