Nine Nodes of Non-Being is a group exhibition presenting works by nine emerging and established artists, thinkers, filmmakers, and researchers from East, South, Southeast Asia, the MENA region, and South America. It conceives of climate-related extinction through various states of negation and excess emerging from each of the nine artistic nodes to examine ways of existing more equitably within our ongoing crises.
Climate data and science on human and non-human extinctions is evident, abundant, and available. However, few of us actually believe that we are going to become extinct, at least not in an immediate sense. The signifiers of this possibility are often deaths and disasters that exist in other places and elsewheres, happening to species and communities we think of as vulnerable—not us. This apathy stems not from a lack of knowledge but from our incapacity to critically and ontologically contend with what the climate crisis truly means for us all. Simply unveiling the material facts of extinction is not enough to alter the realities of structural injustice and our ingrained behaviors or patterns of thinking.
This ongoing extinction is awfully stratified. It is capitalist, racialized, gendered, casteist, ableist, heteronormative, and is compounded by infinite and unnameable, historical and transhistorical, systemic and geopolitical lines of inequalities. Perhaps how art can intervene is to dwell within these non-human or human ontologies that are seen as ‘Other’; not through dubious and flawed processes of identification or superfluous empathy, but rather, to think with a genuinely self-reflexive idea of an individual and collective not-being at all. By situating ourselves within our own negations, we open up possibilities of new ways of being within the climate apocalypse.
Nine Nodes of Non-Being is not an attempt to represent the Anthropocene, but rather conceives of non-being, and thus negation itself, as a creative and generative expanse. The artistic-worlds presented here are not merely signifiers of extinction but real propositions for the unknown. The forms of excess and negation found within the work of the participating artists hold the simultaneity of muchness and blankness; the paradox of extinction itself; that we are both in the immense thick of it (muchness) and yet cannot conceive of it (a blankness). Through these excessive modes, we think about ways of non-being and the climate apocalypse itself in ways we have likely never considered— through kitsch, rest, cringe, bathos, abstraction, silliness, melancholy, madness, and the weird.
The artists taking part this exhibition are Mariam AlZayani, Fayçal Baghriche, Clemencia Echeverri, UNMAKE LAB, Malik Irtiza, Zara Mahmood, Amba Sayal-Bennett, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Ayman Zedani. Their projects span diverse media, including drawings, moving image, sculpture, photo transfer, text, soundscapes, and multi-media installation.
Nine Nodes of Non-Being is curated by Ritika Biswas and emerged from a year-long journey as part of the 421 Curatorial Development Exhibition Program in collaboration with The Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR).
View and download the exhibition press kit on this link.
View and download the children's In-Gallery Activity Guide here.
For school visits, please note that tours can be arranged on request. Kindly email hello@421.online for further assistance.
About the curator:
Ritika Biswas
Ritika Biswas (b. 1995) is a nomadic curator, researcher, and space-maker. She grew up in Kolkata, India and holds a Liberal Arts degree from Yale-NUS College, Singapore, and an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies from the University of Cambridge. She was a curator and special projects producer at New Art Exchange Gallery and Nottingham Arts Mela in the UK from 2019-2021, co-curator of the fifth iteration of Museum Without Walls (2021) for the British Council, and Artistic Director for the 2021 Sea Art Festival titled Non-/Human Assemblages for the Busan Biennale. She recently concluded the 2022 International Research Fellowship at MMCA Seoul with a focus on eco-feminist artists/collectives in South Korea. Foregrounding experimental co-makings, Ritika sees her practice as existing at the nexus of deep research, eco-critical play, collaborative kinships, and justice, particularly within Majority World contexts.