Sustenance

About

Riya Bhagat, Victor Guerin and Elin Yumesheva's film, sculpture and painting mediate sustainable materials, artistic processes and technical innovation, to engage visitors in ecological interdependence. Placed in dialogue, Sustenance unfolds these artists' research-led practices and existential queries, in discursive passage, intermingling past into future. Sustenance proposes a shift to a worlding perspective, where humans, nonhumans and the earth are inextricably interconnected, in a transcontinental cooperative stewardship that preserves one holistic global ecosystem.  

Riya Bhagat’s Fashion After Fashion: The Clothing from the Future as an Ecosystem with Bacteria Living Inside It, 2024, is a futurist fashion imaginary of sculpture and film. Therein, living bacteria produce cellulose on contact with our skin, cultivated by us, to cloth us. We traverse Victor Guerin’s stone and metal sculpture, Liminal, from Cracks of Potential, 2025, whichconfers an uncertain future, an in-between state, where life may, or may not survive, in disrupted ecologies. In Echoes of Extraction, 2024, we witness past extraction industry’s remains, where nature’s ingenious resilience reclaims terrain. Elina Yumasheva’s Living Forms series’ (2024-) recasts the past into the present, exploring pre-petrochemical painting techniques, dyes and materials, to celebrate new painting aesthetics, sustainable processes and expanded potential. Her paintings embody performative movement – ‘the sway of the natural world’, harmonized with human intention.

 Materially and conceptually, their sustainable materials and processes confer human and nature’s interconnected ecologies, intermeshed with human intention, scientific investigation and technology, past into the future. Remedial possibilities unfold, when humans and nature harmonize.

These transcontinental artists’ existential queries suggest potential remedial action. Their artworks embody arts and science’s current literature’s urgencies, regarding climate change and earth’s human non-human entangled interconnectedness.