The Worlds Within... What Is Found There?

An exhibition titled A World in the City themed around zoos and botanical gardens recently opened at the IFA Gallery in Stuttgart. The invited curator from India explored the theme and expanded it into a concept for the show in two ways – firstly, the colonial history of institutions such as world expositions, zoos, gardens and museums where these become sites for knowledge production about the world at large as we see it even today, as well as the imagination of a ‘public’ — the idea of a modern viewing-consuming audience; secondly – it explores our recent history of the hyper-relationship with nature through issues such as Sustainability, Veganism, nature trails, wildlife television channels, and so forth. The curator invited a set of seven works from four artists, as well as a collection of poems and essays from a poet to present in a subtle and nuanced way, the relationship that we share as humans and as a civilisation with nature, the world, and the cosmos

- Kaiwan Mehta

We are all familiar with something we call Natural History, but what would be the history of Natural History? Where I specifically would see Natural History as types of relationships that human beings and human civilisations share with nature and Nature. This relationship is akin to a world-view that people and civilisations develop and live with. We are also passing through a phase in human history where hyper-health-consciousness, Sustainability, and hyper-selective food habits such as veganism are popular and are nearly seen as natural. Our relationship with Nature is most unnatural in these circumstances. Human civilisations have moved from being one amongst equals between different species of plants and animals, to masters of domestication and domination; it is the processes of the latter that create a sense of separation between humans and nature, rather than humans being one amongst many in the natural world. Once this separation, distance, and inherent hierarchy is produced, humans have constantly tried to theorise and dramatise, and even bridge (if only as a ritual, or as an idea) this gap, this separation.