Lahore Biennale 03: Of Mountains and Seas, Curated by John Tain.
07.10.2024 - 08.11.2024, Alhamra Art Center
Even If It Looks Like Grass, 2024
Installation with paper, hand mill and wheat berries, wheat, cellphone
Chow and Lin’s Even If It Looks Like Grass opens up into co-existing systems of wheat and data centers, in a study that spans from the early human history 10,000 years till the present. It looks at global phenomena of agriculture and information technology structures that emerged and spread in the pursuit of efficiency, security, influence, and domination. Spanning the whole of one Alhamra ground floor gallery space, the installation consists of three interconnected components:
The gallery walls, which have been turned into a map room displaying satellite imagery sourced from Google Earth at the same scale, which depicts wheat farms in Pakistan, India, USA, Russia, and Ukraine, as well as data centers from major cities. Thousands of pages of research papers on the subject from open source news platforms and academic databases are pasted in between, suggesting the potential and gaps of big data, which informs and also overwhelms. This visual journey of knowledge discovery invites inspection and reflection on how intertwined and removed we are from the production of data and food staples.
The two systems of Food and Data meet in the center of the gallery within a spatial framework of equivalency and exchange. Set in the middle is a smartphone, a contemporary data device whose market price is equivalent to the amount of flour around it. At the end of the exhibition, the bags of flour will be distributed to local shops and bakeries, ensuring the flour’s continual circulation in the food chain.
In a final intervention, the artists install a wheat grinder and invite viewers to participate in the milling of wheatberries into flour. By bringing this age-old tool into urban space, Chow and Lin ask viewers to examine our place in the geopolitical dynamics in the face of climate change and resource challenges. In an 1885 letter to his brother Theo, artist Vincent van Gogh wrote, “For wheat is wheat, even if it looks like grass at first to townsfolk — and the other way round too.”
in collaboration with Rizq
Installation View: “Even If It Looks Like Grass”
Photo Credits: Chow and Lin