Sarasija Subramanian’s solo exhibit ‘Ban the old, dry methods’ will present two ongoing projects, both of which re-visit either documents or archives from critical moments of the past and raise them to legibility in our current contexts, through a process that is guided by an underlying editorial tendency. The first – ‘The Dictionary of Gardening’ – brings back and re-contextualizes through prints and transfers, pages from the ‘The Encyclopaedia of Horticulture’ written by George Nicholson (published in 1887 in London) to talk of the mutually tamed relationship that gardening as a process inhabits, while the second – ‘Ban the old, dry methods’ – stems from an engagement with the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden’s permanent collection, centered around the ways in which structures of the State and science view the body of the individual, and how in turn such perspectives are co-opted by consequent political regimes, amongst other structures of power.
