The landscape, once the paradigm of location and belonging, is now a guarantee of uncertainty, disorientation, and disturbance.

This is the theme driving a group show at Mumbai based Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke (April-May 2009). A curatorial write-up by art critic Nancy Adajania notes: “Whether in the literary or the visual arts, the tradition of the landscape has articulated the desire to reclaim or recover the natural at the very moment when it’s threatened with annihilation by the unfathomable forces of economic change, technology and architecture.

“The Romantic & Impressionist engagements with landscape, for example, coincide with major transformations of experience – even as colonial expansion, electricity, and the railways altered the countryside forever, artists attempted to address and capture the ‘natural’ – through the optics of the Sublime, of social critique, of nostalgia, or fantasia. Importantly, also, both the Impressionists and the Romantics maintained closer links with science and technology, and keeping pace with alternative or new media at all stages.

“Today, the natural has been re-formatted by a new triad of forces: the media, surveillance, and militarization. The media have now turned nature into the ready-mades of postcard memories, and exclusive holidays; broken it down expertly into Facebook shareware, and displayed it as a quilt of intimate neighborhoods and historic landmarks, all now rendered equally and easily available on Google Earth. Militarization subjugates nature with checkpoints, mine-fields, barbed-wire fencing, and watchtowers. Surveillance now reduces the natural to a landscape of potential threats.”

The landscape is no more designated by specificities of cultural practice. It’s a conceptual terrain, which is inscribed and re-inscribed by narratives reshaping it to their own purposes. This process has led to the formulation of ‘The Landscapes of Where’ in respect to the work of artists Pooja Iranna, Prajakta Potnis Ponmany, Prajakta Palav Aher, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya.