Shipping and the Shipped was conceived in conversation between Stefano Harney and the Mumbai-based artist Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, and the title derives from Harney’s book with Fred Moten, The Undercommons: fugitive planning and black study (Minor Compositions, 2013). The installation features work by Kandalgaonkar, and by the artists Wu Tsang and Arjuna Neuman. One enters the installation in the accompaniment of two texts, one from The Undercommons, and one from the philosopher Denise Ferreira Da Silva whose thought helped to inspire The Undercommons. One is also in the presence of Ranjit Kandalgaonkar’s luminous treated photographs, pictures taken by his father of the ships his father sailed, captained, and piloted. The photos invite us over the horizon of the sea to where time drifts like smoothed wood. We enter the next room but soon we begin to feel that horizon upturn us, and we find ourselves stranded together amidst the sounds of the motley crew, the ship-breaking yards of Alang in Gujarat all around us. We move like sonar through this perilous labour, this breach in the hull and the earth. Now we are engulfed in a horizon, our fantasy of flight concentrated on a single porthole. Through it we can enter another room to find the video work of Wu Tsang in his collaboration with Fred Moten. Here words drift, beginning to ask what brought us together, but soon the sands shift, the ship drags. We were, it seems, always already together, in what Denise Ferreira Da Silva calls a difference without separation. To have been shipped is to have been sent together to each other. Crossing Kandalgaonkar’s horizon again one enters another room to find Arjuna Neuman’s film, Serpent Rain. Made in collaboration with Da Silva, the film explores anomalous time. What kind of time could be made with the raw elements, the timeless sea, and with slave-time, a time without value or future? Neuman and Da Silva invite us to another universe that turns out to be ours. We recall Ranjit’s father’s photographs, time folded in sea and sand and sky.
Inspired by Norway’s grip on the sea, Shipping and the Shipped is for all those who long to be transported and all those who have long been transported.
Stefano Harney
freethought collective