Sonia Mehra Chawla
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Vital To Life (2020-21)
HD Video; 15 minutes 42 seconds
(In collaboration with ASCUS Art & Science, Edinburgh, Marine Scotland and Edinburgh Science Festival 2021).
Vital To Life: Drifters & Wanderers (2021)
Series I-VIII, set of engravings paired with photomicrographs
Engravings: Somerset Velvet with deckle edges, 300 gsm (100% cotton rag, mould made paper, acid-free and lignin-free), 76.2/55.9 cms each
Photomicrographs: archival prints on Hahnemühle Museum Etching, 30.5/21 cms each
In collaboration with Edinburgh Printmakers, ASCUS Art & Science and Marine Scotland UK.
The Non-Human Touch (2021)
What Values Can Emerge from Ruined Landscape?
Film in high definition with sound, 45 minutes
(In collaboration with ASCUS Art & Science, Edinburgh, Marine Scotland and Edinburgh Science Festival 2021.)
Working with archival historical microscope slides, ‘living’ material from the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean, and filmed through microscopes, ‘Vital to Life’ makes the invisible, mysterious and enigmatic world of microorganisms visible, revealing hidden worlds lying beyond the scope of the human eye. Drawing on the inspirational work of evolutionary theorist and biologist Lynn Margulis and animal physiologist and biochemist Prof. Margaret McFall-Ngai, ‘Vital To Life’ reimagines an oceanic worldview of entangled histories, symbiotic relationships and contaminations.
The series has been realized within the framework of ‘Entanglements of Time & Tide’, a visual arts and science engagement project by Sonia that explores the North Sea and its tidal zones through an ecological, political, poetic, cultural and economic lens. Reflecting on the human impact on our environment, and in particular effects on micro-organisms by capital-intensive heavy industry and anthropogenic activities, the project explores the enigmatic life of planktons providing several entry points to understanding larger global issues associated with the world’s oceans, while investigating the impact of technological obsolescence, the drive to consumption and the impacts of the waste created by these technofossils.
The project has been facilitated and supported by Edinburgh Printmakers, Marine Scotland, Creative Scotland, ASCUS Art & Science, Marine Laboratory of the Scottish Government in Aberdeen, Historic Environment Scotland, Edinburgh Science Festival 2021 and Edinburgh Art Festival 2021.
Location: Natural History Section, CSMVS
About the artist
Mehra Chawla's practice is process oriented and research based, with a focus on specific locations and micro histories. Through her artistic projects, she examines how local places contribute to global changes, what drives those changes, how these contributions change over time, how and where scale matters, what are the interactions between macro-structures and micro-agencies, and how efforts at mitigation and adaptation can be locally initiated and adopted.
The current and ongoing phases of her practice mark her close engagement with the present and future of India's coastal agriculture, and coastal and mangrove ecosystems. The artist's practice combines a commitment to the processes of research with a fidelity to the poetics of the artwork. Her work brings together a variety of impulses, ranging from microscopic details of bacterial and microbial cultures to documentary cinematic studies of marginalized groups whose Eco-sensitive occupations have suffered as a result of the decline in their environment.
The artist's work is often a result of sustained collaborations with scientific institutions, research institutions, Non Profit Organizations and Trusts in India, as well as interactions with fishing communities, farming and agricultural communities, tribal and indigenous people of India.
Through her practice, Mehra Chawla explores, dissects, re-examines and re-envisions spaces that exist at the intersections of art and science, social and natural realms, self and the other, focusing on the important dimensions of human engagement with and within nature, ranging from the built-environment to the 'wilderness', and human and non-human narratives and interrelations in the Anthropocene.
The artist lives and works in New Delhi, India.