Curated by Beth Citron and Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Karthik KG | Manjot Kaur | Thukral and Tagra | Raqs Media Collective | Shezad Dawood |
Judy Blum Reddy
 

Non-fungible Speculations began as a prompt in 2021 when NFTs (non-fungible tokens) were infiltrating the mainstream contemporary art world. Little did we know that a novelty would go on to become normalized in such a short time. We embarked on this project to invite leading artists from around the world to critically engage with the speculative challenges of NFTs. The intention was to unpack a new medium’s multiple potentials and to find visual languages that are distinct from what we see in popular NFT marketplaces.

Our invitation was intentionally broad, resulting in considerations as wide-ranging as the changing value of gold, imaginary and real geographies, deep time conspiracies, mythologies, and dream catchers. While Karthik KG speaks of the octopuses that arrived 540 million years ago by an icy meteor; Manjot Kaur moves between the past and the future by cross-pollinating ancient myths and histories. Raqs Media Collective references the speculative nature of the market through a 3D modeled gold coin highlighting changing market prices of gold in real-time. In Somnium Genero by Thukral and Tagra, the imaginary site of the dream meets the iconographic adaptation of Minions to speak about the fragility of contemporary life. Shezad Dawood reinterprets the storied pasts and potential futures of the hill station Kalimpong in West Bengal, while Judy Reddy's New Old Maps imagine geographies, subverting formal ways in which territories and borders are cartographically delineated.

Together, they propose new economic, spatial, and mythical readings altering existing perceptions of contemporary reality. The works in this exhibition are presented in both a gallery setting and in a specially designed virtual environment built by architect and digital artist Sudhir Ambasana, intimating depth beyond the flatness of most NFT showcases. In its culmination, Non-fungible Speculations critically situates the proliferation of NFTs in contemporary art amid the chorus of crypto’s speculative economy globally.