Haat Katali serves as an elegy to the loss of the indigenous rhino species, with its thematic focus narrowing on the Sundarbans—the homeland of Bishwajit Roy and the conceptual root of this exhibition. The exhibition transforms the otherwise neutral architecture of the gallery into a vitrine that houses the fossilized memory of a living ecosystem. At its core, the exhibition critiques the ecological crisis born of anthropocentric myopia—a destructive legacy of human interventions that prioritize progress over preservation. It presents a stark binary between civilizational growth, often conceived as a linear trajectory of historical progress, and the cautionary call against the very same self-determining forces that exploit the primal resources sustaining life itself. In essence, Haat Katali interrogates modernity’s paradoxical cannibalization of nature to advance human artifice of intelligence and dominance. While familiar, this narrative places us within the opposing camps of victims and perpetrators, emphasizing the interconnectedness of ecological and human fragility.
Contextually, the Sundarbans—situated at the southern fringe of a delta—occupies a liminal space, both historically and geopolitically, as a civilizational outpost. It remains vulnerable to the dual forces of exploitation and conservation, shaped by a consumer culture driven by unchecked capitalistic growth across social, cultural, and economic spheres. Within this eco-chamber of extractive logic, humans emerge as tragic protagonists, torn between hubris and the existential fear of extinction. They struggle against the forces of nature while paradoxically succumbing to them.
In this exhibition the rhinos are the heroes , although not of their destinies– which remained with the humans to orchestrate. Historical records suggest the last sighting of rhinos in the Sundarbans occurred in the 19th century, their footprints forever erased by both natural and human-induced factors. Yet, the exhibition is not merely a requiem for irreversible loss; rather, it seeks to unearth the deep vulnerability that underpins all existence, or so one surmises!
In Haat Katali, the stoneware rhinos frozen mid-stride on a track of soil evoke a passage without beginning or end—a suspended telos of visual mythology. The imprints they bear on their bodies are textured with echoing elements of tidal marks, tree lichens, and golpata leaves. Resonating with nostalgia, these transform the sculptures into vessels of memory in the guise of artifacts of ecological awareness. The terracotta replicas of handprints on cow-dung, traditionally adorning rural huts, form wavy maps illuminated by lighting that mimics tidal rhythms. These works embody the semiotics of oral traditions and rituals, testifying to a syncretic belief system that transcends ethno-nationalistic divides and celebrates the Sundarbans’ unique mode of coexistence. Here, land and water, river and ocean, human and non-human intertwine in ways that resist the corrupt logic of modern progress. Or rather, how it used to be! Sculptural installations of mangrove root systems and ceramic plaques reimagine the landscape with an aesthetic rooted in both personal memory and ecological reflection. However, the exhibition’s restrained aesthetic—quiet and contemplative—falls short of inciting urgent concern, offering instead a sensorial experience where nuanced critique gives way to a visually pleasing yet conceptually contradictory, casual commentary on the felling of trees to make way for human settlements– curiously couched in the vernacular denotation of Haat Katali.
This approach of bearing witness to non-existence of the once-living beings is reminiscent of Antigone (Sophocles’ tragic heroine) and her defiance of Creon’s decree to leave her brother’s body unburied. The demand for material burial transcends into a metaphysical understanding of death as part of a greater existential whole. By refusing to reduce death to disposability, it gestures toward a phenomenological narrative of coexistence and interconnectedness where life and death are inextricably linked. In this light, the shadowy procession of the lost rhinos becomes a potent reminder to live with greater ethical responsibility towards a more-than-human world. Haat Katali ultimately calls for a deeper awareness of our shared ecological and existential vulnerabilities, urging us to reimagine progress as a pursuit rooted in meaningful co-creation. Or in other words , it emphasizes the co-dependence of everything within the environment to lend and necessitate meaning to each other in a trans-actional sense. Therefore, the disappearance of rhinos portends a similar fate for humans in a cycle of symbiotic counter-action. To further ground the thesis let’s turn to Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world which affirms human existence as inseparable from the existence of the “other,” however, the broader meaning of existence transcends the ontological framework. It calls for an ethical mode of co-existence rooted in collective activity argued in Jonathan Webber’s Rethinking Existentialism ; existence can be understood as “the relational property of having a set of parts ordered in such a way as to collectively perform some activity,” where each part symbiotically intra-acts with others on a horizontal plane, free from the hierarchical, instrumental values imposed by human notions of usefulness. The essence of ‘being human in the world’, therefore, is ethical and universal, bound by a mutual interdependence in the continuum of human, nonhuman and the natural.
Returning to the gallery space, one cannot help but be struck by the juxtaposition of disparate aesthetics—poor and refined. The terracotta forms seems to find a kindred connection with the ‘found roots’; in contrast, the polished stoneware ceramic rhinos, bathed in the ethereal warmth of the gallery lights articulate the allure of (art)market forces rather than a poignant ecological call to action; their crafted surfaces marked with carbon footprints.
Within the gallery’s intimate yet sanitized setting, the looming threat of the Sundarbans’ destruction has been transformed into an aestheticized narrative—through an apparent act of archiving, collating evidence of a past seemingly disjointed from the present, thus revealing an uneasy balance between art and activism. It is only through the exhibition’s handout that the core themes—human folly, insatiable greed, hubris, blind progress, and a haunting forgetfulness—emerge in full clarity. Resonating with the stark reminder: “We become—with each other, or not at all”—which Donna Harraway leaves us with — the avowed ethical framework of the exhibition might yet urge reflection on our collective responsibility and the fragile interconnectedness of all things.