"Grounding the experience of war within the landscape resonates with Kawita Vatanajyankur’s series ‘Field Work’ (2020–ongoing), which topologizes the future condition of human labor as universal. Presented by Nova Contemporary, The Scale of Injustice (2021) and The Pendulum (2023), a new piece from the series, are being shown in the Discoveries sector. In the former video, the artist’s body simultaneously serves as both the fulcrum and plates of a massive set of scales positioned on earthy ground. Symbolizing Indian cotton farmers’ struggles for seed sovereignty and fair income, the scales never rest in equilibrium. Cotton seeds drop into the baskets at either end, while the artist, carrying the weight, smashes onto the ground and spills the seeds.
From the cotton fields of India to the farmlands of Ayutthaya in Thailand, Vatanajyankur searches for local strategies that can counter the environmental disasters – such as pesticide abuse, seed commercialization, and poverty – that come with agrotechnology. Her studio functions as an incubator for crops and bodily experiments that incorporate research into how machine intelligence might displace human labor and identity. The laboratory, which forms the virtual background to her performance-based moving images, is also an allegorical space of physical and psychological vacuity and exhaustion, anticipated on a global scale.
Ranging from local realities to planetary futures, Vatanajyankur’s project exemplifies what Elizabeth Deloughrey describes as scalar telescoping. Scalar telescoping is an act that foregrounds or counters the disjuncture between experience and knowledge – between the world as it is and the discourses of politics or science – that is characteristic of the current epoch of ecological meltdown and technological acceleration."
