The Timekeepers

THE OAK TREES of a forest on the outskirts of Srinagar. Hearing the crunch of chinar leaves in autumn in Naseem Bagh. Watching sunlight through the pine trees of Uji, Kyoto, while sipping on tea. The plump blooms of laburnum (or amaltas) during childhood summers spent in Ludhiana. These are just a handful of memories that turned into muses for the artist duo Thukral & Tagra in their most recent exhibition Arboretum—Ebb and Flow mounted at Nature Morte, Mumbai. For nearly the last two decades Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra have worked collaboratively with a wide range of media from painting, sculpture, installations to interactive games, video, performance and design. They have worked for so long together that they now believe one of them is the thin brush and the other the thick brush. Arboretum—Ebb and Flow brings together their twin concerns of nature and technology.

To enter the stark cement gallery of Nature Morte, walking distance from Kala Ghoda, Mumbai, is to find oneself suddenly submerged in a world that is both natural and technological. As you wander the gallery, you’ll encounter the various seasons, from the yellows of summer to the russets of autumn to the whites of winter. At the gallery itself the artworks carry no titles, but a newsletter (which one can pick up and keep) provides the names and locations of the works. For the Gurugram-based duo the art at this show originates from the varied geographies of Kashmir, Japan and their home base. In the curatorial note, Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, an independent writer and curator, writes, “The scope of the Arboretum since its inception has been to reflect on the hyper-stimulated world of data and the several other digital meditations through which we see the world.”

Arboretum—Ebb and Flow has its roots in the pandemic, when Jiten Thukral found himself in Pondicherry and Sumir Tagra in Goa. They would usually speak to each other between five and seven in the evening on FaceTime. Sumir would take screenshots on his phone and looking at them later he’d realise that Jiten was usually standing by trees with twilight casting a glow upon him. The connection was not always the best and the photos would also capture the blue breaking line, which occurs when the internet is unstable. Confined in their respective geographies they started to think of the pandemic as a glitch as well, it was a severance from re­ality. At the same time, they were also reading different books such as Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. The idea of trees as sentient beings and the need to win back life from technology appealed to them.

Elaborating on the tree network, Sumir says, “They talk from the crowns, they talk from the mycelium network. They also talk through passing nitrogen from one to another. It’s like nursing. And it’s quite interesting that they don’t just do this for their own species like cousins or brothers or lovers. They do it to other species too.” This investment with the natural world and the investigation of the technological is apparent at Arboretum—Ebb and Flow. Each of the dozen-plus art works zooms in on a different facet of nature. You see a web of pine needles in one, yellow petals in another and fallen snow in the third. As a viewer one is struck by the plumpness of the amaltas, the velveteen nature of the snow, which appears as if it would melt on touching, the grooves on the bark and the light bounc­ing off leaves. No canvas is a simple rectangle or square shaped, instead the content seems to be pushing against the limits of the medium. The shapes of the canvas are essentially inspired by the circles and squares of data. The artists would take a canvas and then stretch it across a birchwood frame to give it a sculptur­al feel and to dismantle a machine-made aesthetic.

Beyond India, their explorations took them to Japan, where they travelled from Hiroshima to Tokyo to Kyoto. Japan holds a special place for them as they first went there as two backpackers in 2002 and have since returned multiple times, first with their respective wives and then their sons. Their group has expanded from two to six and the trees and plants of the country have stood witness to it all. Trees have long been silent witnesses and senti­nels of our lived experiences. Jiten says in the newsletter, “We are fascinated by how nature reclaims space…Some spaces continue to be agile despite the world crumbling around them.”

For the artist duo Arboretum—Ebb and Flow is an attempt to overcome plant blindness. Sumir defines this as “The tree is only a background. It’s always a site which is given to you. You don’t notice the tree. But you will notice the girl or car standing below it.” To remind us of our own plant blindness, their work shows us the lushness of moss and the denseness of tree bark. But on these ‘natural’ surfaces they scatter geometric shapes that can be interpreted as pixels or glitches or CD-ROMs.

Sumir explains, “What does 2GB look like in a data forma­tion? Does it look like a square? Does it look like a circle? Does it look like a sound wave? I don’t know. So this is something which I’ve been really curious about as an information designer.” As we take more and more photographs and store more of ourselves on the cloud, future generations will see us through this “data holding”. And this data could be a “portal or a fold or a memory box”.

With the onslaught of technology those like Jiten and Sumir, born in the late 1970s, often yearn for a simpler, more tactile time. Arboretum—Ebb and Flow is very much a show also about nostalgia. By reminding us of the seasons, it takes one back to a time where air-conditioning did not transform the indoors, where seasons meant particular fruits, sights and smells. By dividing their work into Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn, the artists add a cohesive narrative to the show, which reminds us of not only of the passage of time but also the circle of life.

Sumir, a trained typographer, says, “I want to teach myself to see trees as typographies,” to understand it from its length and girth and how it stands in relation to other trees, does it bend towards them, or does it shy away?

The second edition of the Arboretum reminds one that nature is a place for both rest and revolt. Sumir refers to the story of the ‘fallen chinar’, where a mighty and ancient chinar tree fell down at Kashmir University and how a few years ago the tree became a site of protest for the students. These are the kind of stories that influenced the making of the show. The duo creates their art 0while listening to music (from Japanese piano to Moroccan beats) and news podcasts. So they are influenced both by the immediate and the distant, the pollution in Gurugram and the war in Ukraine. It is hard for them to pin­point how their works come into being, but to them each work serves as a “timekeeper”. A timekeeper that tells us to hold nature in a tight embrace.

(Arboretum—Ebb and Flow by Thukral & Tagra is on display at Nature Morte, Mumbai, till October 12)

Arboretum 19art and cultureart exhibitionsdigital mysteriesJiten ThukralSumir TagraTagra