The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art was delighted to announce a special exhibition at India Art Fair 2022, titled Notes on Tending, supported by Tarana Sawhney.
Since 2017, FICA’s public art projects at the fair have curated rich participatory experiences, and were led by different artists who structured wonderful interactive displays. This year, we are pleased to be shifting gears to showcase an exhibition reflecting the different kinds of relationships we have built over the years, highlighting our work with people that has created new substructures of dialogue and engagement for us as well as our audiences.
Notes on Tending presented a rumination in process, a threshold taking shape, creating and extending space for considerations around ‘care’ and its many manifestations in contemporary art practice today. Listening closely to how modalities and intimate registers of care have expanded in the present moment, our display will bring together works by some of our grantees as well as interventions by promising young practitioners who form a significant part of our community in the arts.
In language, a proposition can be an invitation to think together, and the simplicity of a preposition rests in what it brings into relation with itself.
To think of care as collectivity is to consider merging the possibilities of systems of support and modalities that frame the collective as collaborative. In a time where precarity fosters instability, the idea of the assemblage as an open-ended gathering helps us envision a coexistive commons—artistic practice that tends towards entanglements, towards interplays between humans and more-than-human forms of being.
Care—as both a proposition and a preposition—is a relationship that instigates us; it carries and is in turn carried forth by difference as well as the force of affinity. An act of emphasising relatedness. Of bringing together.
Reading the interplay between artistic practice and the evolving, intrinsic vocabularies of collaborative making, we are urged to ask:
How do we construe a proposition for care? How do we make visible more infrastructure and more speculation that supports the same?
We invited viewers think with us—in person at India Art Fair from 28 April to 1 May 2022.
