Assembling Grounds: Practices of Coexistence

How must we change our society so that the Earth remains habitable in the long term? In July 2025, Fellow Travellers. Art as a Tool to Change the World will open the new exhibition chapter Assembling Grounds. Practices of Coexistence. The chapter was developed in India and Sri Lanka on the basis of the ZKM travelling exhibition initiated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Critical Zones: In Search of a Common Ground (2022-24). The travelling exhibition was prepared and realized by the ZKM together with the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai and with the support of the network of Goethe-Instituts South Asia—an inspiring collaboration that is now continued.

On its journey, the exhibition brought together diverse locations, local communities, and ideas from different contexts. Artists who participated in the exhibition project through local networks have now been invited to respond to Fellow Travellers questions as part of Assembling Grounds.

The works that resulted, including numerous new productions, interrogate modern paradigms of knowledge production and linear technological progress. They confront them with micro-histories of cultural resistance, drawing on traditional cultural techniques from various places on the Indian subcontinent. Art practice thus becomes a medium for the restoration and preservation of knowledge that is lost or threatened with oblivion due to ecological, urban, and political or economic developments. It is precisely these bodies of knowledge, which are often ignored in institutional contexts, that contain a wealth of valuable insights about how human and nonhuman actors, nature, and culture can be sustainably interwoven.

Many of the invited artists engage with the format of the archive and the assemblage: Parag Tandel’s and Kadambari Koli-Tandel’s works, for example, bring together local stories, recipes, and traditions of Mumbai’s Koli fishing communities. Ishita Chakraborty’s sound sculpture interweaves human and nonhuman voices that she collected on her research trips to both India’s mangrove forest in the Sundarbans and the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. The exhibition chapter also presents concrete alliances between art institutions, public spaces, and nonhuman entities. Abhijit Patil, for example, focuses on the politics around seeds and seed banks; and Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro continues to develop his long-term project on the Katzenwedelwiese, an orchard meadow in Karlsruhe, and creates a series of objects from local organic materials that demonstrate the potential of a perma-circular economy.

Assembling Grounds rejects one-dimensional representations of local knowledge and actors. Instead, the projects create multiple, open-ended narratives that reflect our changing world more accurately than a single story ever could. They explore a new, "interlocal” approach that connects diverse places and fosters context-dependent dialogue.

The opening will be accompanied by events and activations on July 25 and 26, 2025, at ZKM | Karlsruhe that will be live-streamed here.

Friday, July 25, from 4 pm on: Keynote by Sria Chatterjee and a panel discussion with Jahnavi Phalkey, Ravi Agarwal, Bettina Korintenberg, Amruta Nemivant, and Mira Hirtz.

Saturday, July 26, from 11 am on: Panel discussions with artists of the exhibition and a performance by Mallika Das Sutar.
From 3 pm events and performances at the Katzenwedelwiese (not streamed).

Participating artists: Maksud Ali Mondal, Nilanjan Bhattacharya, Bio Design Lab, Ishita Chakraborty, Anuja Dasgupta, Mallika Das Sutar, Abhijit Patil, Hema Shironi, Parag Tandel, Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro with Oliver Selim-Boualam and Katzenwedelwiese

Curators: Daria Mille and Mira Hirtz, assistance by Hanna Jurisch

With the support by ADAGP.

In collaboration with the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai and support by the Goethe-Instituts / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi, Kolkata, Pune, and Colombo.

Please find further information here.

Press contact: Lilli Roser, lilli.roser@zkm.de / T +49 (0) 721-8100-1220