Apnavi Makanji’s second solo exhibition at TARQ, PSYCHOPOMP, comes at a pivotal time in the artist’s life and practice. Featuring their drawings, collages, mixed media sculptures and a video, the works in the show are about post-colonial extractivist histories, queering the future, human connection and navigating the current Phallocratic Heterotopia.
Memory, botany and ecology play key roles in Makanji’s artistic idiom. In this show, Makanji’s artworks merge visuals of biological species with images of extractivism, highlighting how removed our idea of nature is from the truth of our actions towards it. An example of this is Styx, an installation of found objects and blueprints of crude oil extraction sites in West Africa belonging to the French Elf petroleum company, which portray the artist’s concerns on subjects of neo-colonialism, slave labour, and extractivism.
Juxtaposed with this bleak reality of the world, a portion of this body of work explores what is termed by the artist as, “the possibilities of a post anthropocentric world through a queer lens”. Here, Makanji views being queer as the ability to adapt, as well as the ability to be kind, compassionate and soft. As described by the artist, “PSYCHOPOMP guides us toward but also embodies this proposition of a Queertopia that stems from a collective, intersectional awareness that is not exclusive to our species but extends itself to every other species including the botanical and mineral worlds.”
click here to enter the online viewing room
