On the Nature of Landscape
Curatorial Poject: Ragesh A S Solo
Exhibition:
Dimensions Art Center/ Chongqing, China
2019
Observations of Chongqing cityscape and Ragesh's on-site new works
When I met Ragesh in 2019 at Dimensions Art Center during his residency in Chongqing the mountain-city, his visit to China for the first time, he told me that he had never lived without nature. I was intrigued, and we had conversations about “what is natural” and the conceptions of nature and landscape, of which are not always similar across different contexts. The exhibition documents the intensive dialogues on the subject of contemporary landscape, and the fragments of thoughts about how the world is not an external thing to one’s existence.
“On the Nature of Landscape” is an attempt of employing embodied labour of curating as artistic practice, of which the final outcome is a process of becoming, in its self-development.
This plan was made to explore the abstract mental settings and visual consequences in space. The exhibition continues to an expanded territory outside of the gallery space, ending with a tree surrounded by a brick fence.
In this exhibition, the landscape represents an illusion, a product of contemporary society, built upon systematic conditions and goals. On the one hand, it questions the constructed environment that is the opposition to nature, metaphorically and physically; on the other hand, it shares an attempt to embrace the differences and eliminate the barriers between different cultures.