Time as a Mother examines our temporal relationships towards nature and the built environments we live with. What is time? We perceive it in relation to our own lifespans, failing to comprehend deep time as a force on the planet, shaping our very existence as a species. The exhibition uses time-based media to create a multifaceted space of film, poetry and text, sound, and narratives, to explore organic and inorganic worldmaking through time, but also the multiplicity of relationships unfolding between the human and more-than-human, their different temporalities and overlapping co-existences.

Time is a physical and philosophical concept that might have different cultural meanings, reverberations, and implications in our lives towards nature. It might be seen as nurturing or be perceived as cruel and destructive. The show co-curated by Ravi Agarwal and Damian Christinger will bring together perspectives from an Indian and European background, exploring the transcultural possibilities in the changes that our notions of time might need in this geological epoch we call the Anthropocene, to indicate the man-made changes in climate and environment defining the catastrophes we face together.

Time heals all wounds, they say; the temporalities of our extraction economies, the accelerating destruction of habitat, and the ticking clock of extreme weathers might just prove this saying wrong. To understand time on a planetary scale, we need to re-engage with its poetical qualities and develop a new approach towards our own, human, lifespans in relation to stones and sand, forests and rivers, mountains and deltas, the territories we shaped and are being shaped by us as a species.