The team at TARQ is delighted to present Apnavi Makanji’s Appropriation Disinformation - Nature and the Body Politic for the first time in India. Initially exhibited at this year’s Dhaka Art Summit, entitled "Seismic Movements" curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt, the materials for the work were sourced from the Atlas International Larousse Politique et Economique (1950). These pages making up Makanji’s collages are records of the treasures of the globe as represented through the eyes of the imperial powers in their quest for progress and the modern condition. In fact, these pages of statistics are effectively lists of extractivism. They remain silent on violence inflicted on the environment, on modern-day slavery and on the displacement of indigenous communities.
The artist has chosen to look at them instead as tools of capitalism and proof of systematic violence. These collages are not only a representation of what has been forgotten, buried or annihilated, they also stand in for a subconscious that is mutant and diseased. In its soft sensuality and secretions, the work attempts to trigger a visceral memory of a situated environment that existed before it was reduced to highly mobile commodities.
Makanji works with the media of installation, drawing, and film, producing complex constructs informed by botany, memory, displacement and environmental urgency. They are interested in exploring the intersection of these concepts within the context of the human engendered climate emergency.
This text has been reproduced in part from the catalogue of Seismic Movements – the catalogue of the 2020 Dhaka Art Summit.
