Sreshta Rit Premnath’s Meditations on Makeshift Sites

For his exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Sreshta Rit Premnath has filled the gallery with minimalist assemblages of shiny aluminium containers that echo the forms of cardboard boxes, weedy soil patches, a chain-link fence and white plaster slabs evocative of limp limbs. From the ceiling hang makeshift jugs from which water trickles through intravenous tubes onto the erratic plant life below. One assemblage, Hold/Fold 2 (all works 2021), features a curved piece of plaster reminiscent of a skatepark’s architecture, out of which sprout weeds, grass and possibly the beginnings of a bush or tree. These bleak sculptural configurations conjure up improvised interventions on neglected sites: urban community gardens, migrant encampments, squatter areas.

In addition to the gallery’s regular green exit sign, four bright-red neons – one on each wall – communicate different and distinct imperatives on each side: INSIST/EXIST, WAIT/WAKE, ESCAPE/ARRIVE and – the inspiration for the show’s title – GRAVE/GROVE. Premnath seems to be asking whether these paired words are anthithetical or complementary to one another. The signs might be intended to guide our interpretation of the perplexing assemblages, suggesting, for instance, that, when it comes to makeshift spaces of abjection such as a refugee camp, to escape one place is always to arrive at another. 

Organized concurrently and in collaboration with Premnath’s companion exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, ‘Grave/Grove’ is the culmination of a yearlong series of virtual dialogues and a special edition of Shifter, the journal the artist co-edits with Avi Alpert, focused on ‘waiting’ – a phenomenon, they claim, that has defined the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. As they ask in the publication: ‘What does the condition of waiting reveal about us, our world and the natural environment that sustains it?’ 

Perhaps unintentionally, ‘Grave/Grove’ calls to mind a 2011 show, also at the List Visual Arts Center, which restaged Hans Haacke’s 1967 solo exhibition at MIT. Before his well-known projects in institutional critique, Haacke understood his artworks as physical and biological systems that communicated with each other and with their environments. At the centre of the show stood Grass and Grass Cube (both 1967): heaps of dirt seeded with grass that sprouted inside the gallery. Yet, whereas Haacke’s practice shifted from biological to political systems in the late 1960s, Premnath’s sculptures aspire to straddle both, insisting on the entanglement of the human and nonhuman in an age that approaches the apocalyptic. 

In ‘Grave/Grove’, it is difficult to locate an inkling of hopefulness, even though, according to the exhibition literature, the weeds – many of which appeared to be in poor health during my visit – represent ‘a kind of insistence’ for the artist, and ‘await a new world, with or without us’. Regardless, fatalism seems to flood Premnath’s project. His austere assemblages cast Haacke’s Grass as a quaint relic of a time in which possibilities seemed to proliferate and artists were confident in their ability to intervene in disparate systems, reshaping historical trajectories in profound and exhilarating ways.

Certainly, Premnath is right in acknowledging that COVID-19 has thrown into sharp relief our collective sense of biopolitical doom. It was only a few blocks from the gallery that, in 2020, biotech researchers at Moderna were racing to engineer a powerful vaccine: the most awaited technoscientific development in recent memory. Yet, global capitalism and corporate greed have contributed to vaccine apartheid, creating the conditions for the emergence of the Omicron variant, which promises to prolong the course of the virus for months, if not years, to come. Premnath’s new body of work may lack a signpost that points toward a less damaged world, but it encourages us to reflect critically on the spaces and circumstances of the disenfranchised.

Sreshta Rit Premnath's ‘Grave/Grove’ is on view at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA, until 13 February.

^{Main image: Sreshta Rit Premnath, 'Grave/Grove' at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge 2021, installation view. Courtesy: © the artist and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; photograph: Julia Featheringill}