We are all familiar, of course, with the remarkable surge in recent times of real estate projects packaged to meet the demands of an ever growing and overly competitive city populace. Most of us have a stack of glossy pamphlets, selling ideas of a better lifestyle, of bigger and fancier homes. However, incessant urban development schemes swallow farms and hinterlands, resulting in renewed usages of both land and labour. Four artists have presented solo projects that engage with the politics of such change and its consumption in Nature Morte's recent exhibition titled Land of No Horizon in collaboration with the Experimenter Gallery in Kolkata.
Thrilled to see the relatively young gallery with its troupe of experimental and equally young artists in Delhi, I decided to drop in on the opening night itself. The exhibition's concept note opens with an extract from American poet Ralph Walden Emerson's essay, Nature (1836):
"Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon, which no man has, but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of all these men's farms, yet to this, their land-deeds give them no title."
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