I Seem to Be a Verb

I Seem To Be A Verb presents a new chapter in Rithika Pandey’s evolving cosmology. Bringing together a body of works that, in their sincere playfulness and imaginative rigour, explore our emerging emotional landscapes in the age of contamination. The exhibition draws a parallel between ‘contamination and compassion’, orbiting around a crucial inquiry: how do you choose to soften when the world is falling apart? The title of this show borrows from the American polymath Buckminster Fuller’s eponymous book, in which he reflects on the human as an active process unfolding within larger ecological systems, proposing that we are dynamic patterns of energy in constant exchange with our environment. In Rithika’s new works, this proposition becomes visceral. Her characters do not exist as sealed bodies, but come undone under the pressures of change and inevitable transmutations. They engage in ritualistic behaviours, encounter other-than-human life-worlds with wonderment, and navigate thresholds that are both physical and spiritual. Bodies and borders leak in multiple, indeterminate directions. To “be a verb” here is to become porous, vulnerable to contamination and being reshaped endlessly in the process. With an eerie undercurrent of ecological collapse lingering across the span of works, Rithika’s paintings reflect on the notion of a ‘post-natural’ world where the boundaries between what is artificial and organic are muddied, paired with a delicate colour palette that mimics the smog-ridden atmospheres of our metropolitan cities. Relations unfold akin to the way viruses pass through cellular membranes, between organisms and across land, defying ideas of self-contained bodies, species, and territories. The introduction of sentient, soft technological life forms extends the artist’s longstanding love for science fiction and her desire to bring impossible worlds into fruition. Here, contamination exceeds its destructive tendencies and becomes a methodology for collaboration. As the scholar Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes: “Collaboration means working across difference, and that leads to contamination. Without collaboration, we all die.” This line of inquiry resonates with Rithika’s ongoing research into “soft futurism” — a worldview that reimagines futures beyond dominant narratives of apocalypse and techno-dystopia, and gesturing toward futures rooted in the intelligence of care and intimacy with our other-than-human counterparts. A story of worlds that shimmer at the edges, drawing inspiration from the transgressive science-fictional imaginaries of writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler and Donna Haraway. If we are constantly written and re-written by the worlds we move through, how may we understand contamination as an active creative force? How might these new adaptations shape our ways of being in the world? To soften may just be the strategy we need to make sense of the contradictions we presently face. To seem to be a verb at this moment is to accept that we are weathered by the world, our bodies, and those of others, mutate alongside the climates we have made, the atmosphere enters us; contamination becomes intimacy; collapse becomes a strange form of relation. We are constantly in negotiation with our becomings and the work of staying human has never been more complex and demanding.