Thukral & Tagra's Digital Exhibit Is An Exploration Of The Living Memories Of Trees

I remember a time when the digital and the analog worlds were separate; a time before the smartphone when to be online, you’d have to turn on your computer and establish the dial-up connection. Only then would you be on the internet. It took time and it was a much limited space that you would and could enter and eventually get out of. Cut to the present time when that distance between online and offline worlds is practically non-existent and your hand instinctively reaches for the phone every time you sit by yourself for more than a minute like a creeper vine ches for support. We’re in so deep into the attention economy that even a break fin scrolling comes in form of another video that with but the aesthetics of the outside; a montage of birds, trees and lakes that we look at on our screens in our own twisted versions of touching grass.

Thukral and Tagra, a homegrown artist duo, explore the same diminishing distance and the relationship between real and digital worlds in their latest exhibition, 'Arboretum Ebb & Flow', which is on display at Nature Morte in Delhi till October 12. Arboretum was a project that was born during the pandemic as an archive of trees drawn with pixels depicting digital glitches, interchanging real with imaginary and vice-versa. In the second edition, the artists present trees as cultural artifacts that give us a socio-political insight into the world. 

Thukral and Tagra are a multifaceted artist duo that have worked with painting, gaming, archiving and publishing and are constantly experimenting with new mediums and techniques to engage the public in important social and political discourse and push the boundaries of what art can do and be. Initially the artists worked with the themes of global consumer culture but with their recent projects they have pivoted to climate change and ecology.

An arboretum is a botanical garden where trees, shrubs and plants are cultivated. In Thukral and Tagra’s arboretum however, the trees are painted hyper-realistically. They're glitched out, pixelated and overlayed on each other as if they’re another image online that’s coming apart. The works emerge as a distorted memory of trees; something a robot 100 years from now would conjure if it were asked to describe what nature once looked like. The imagery is a hauntological depiction of our lost touch with the ecosystem muddled with the symptoms of a digital age. Arboretum Ebb & Flow forms an amalgamation of the artists’ memories of the trees that they witnessed in Kashmir, Japan & Punjab juxtaposed with the memories of the trees themselves; that watch times and people change all around them in one, multidimensional recollection of nature and culture.

Follow Thukral & Tagra here.

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