Crucible of chaos

The wreckage of progress is indistinguishable from the wreckage of destruction. Look at any building site where something is being repurposed. Look at any war zone. In January, Nirox, a 30ha sculpture garden on the outskirts of Krugersdorp installed Future Fables, a work by Indian artist Vibha Galhotra, the result of a brief residency in 2024. It’s an architectonic piece with rubble and sound.

When you step into its space, which is 4m high x 7m round, your internal noises subside. It’s like entering a religious edifice. You can only be silent. The work tells of debris. Yet, this is no rubbish tale.

The product of a dismantled school near Kromdraai, northwest of Johannesburg, and a children’s playground being turned into a basketball court, the work bears testimony to other’ people’s dreams, which have seen closure. Poetically, it touches the thorny bits of our world: climate emergencies; forced migration; and war.

It’s also about collaboration. Conceptualised by Galhotra, it was installed by 10 men from local settlements under construction expert Nyiko Maluleke. Comprising many welded-together metal frames, it has a foundation about 1m deep into the earth.

It was incubated during the Covid-19 pandemic. War was in the air between Russia and Ukraine. Galhotra wrote an essay about the project, formalising her ideas. She edited it, slicing away ruthlessly until a poem emerged. This poem is the work’s heart. In the mellow voice of Rahul Baswani, it is easy on the ear, heartbreaking on the soul. Backed by Krishna on cello and played on a loop, it holds you.

Nirox is a magical place. A large water monitor might quietly cross your path as it slips into the water. A southern red bishop might be seen investigating the long grasses, its plumage feeling illegally bright against a million greens. A red-chested cuckoo sings its three-noted song through the space, or “Piet-My-Vrou” colloquially. The nature is lush, but curated with a clear hand that keeps it pristine, if not a little eerie.

Wits University’s Sharlene Khan, a professor of fine arts, and Dilip Menon, who chairs the university’s department of Indian studies, guided the launch, touching the work, literally and conceptually, as they questioned the artist.

As you touch the work, you realise the piece sanctifies ordinary detritus. Chunks of concrete and tile now have the status of precious and sacred archaeological relics.

“My studio is in an urban village in Delhi,” said Galhotra, in answer to Menon’s questions and his reference to Delhi as the “second circle of hell”.

She concurred: “The city is in a state of endless construction and overpopulation. I collect debris there. There is no legal repurposing of construction waste. India is a new, booming economy. Property construction is important, but the detritus of destruction is part of the equation. As an artist, I need to make people feel what we are doing to the world. I need to make a safe space.”

The work is not a closed circle. It is not roofed. You do not bend your head in humility to the gods when you enter its portals, rather you instinctively raise your head and straighten your spine to allow your eyes to follow the work into the sky.

“India is a developing country; our art audiences are unsophisticated. My audience is very important for my art. I want to tell them a new story, but I must figure out my navigation point,” she added, engaging Khan’s probing the politics of “I don’t know” among contemporary society. “You get immersed in the rubble and its values, from ecological emergency, to wars that colour our reading of being here. Ours is a time of ‘I don’t know’.

“Debris is everywhere. Cleaning it up is another capitalist idea. War is a money-making machine. As is climate change. There are great mockeries of serious disasters that underlie our world. I think we need to be more conscious about those things. The fables that they cast are in the future.”

Galhotra was born in Kaithal, Haryana, Northern India. She read for her undergraduate degree in Chandigarh and completed her masters at Kala Bhavan Santiniketan.

“Chandigarh was designed by Le Corbusier — and established by the poet Rabindranath Tagore. Delhi was a shock for me. So much is happening at the same time. Delhi became my point of reference, after about six months,” she said.

Khan spoke of Pranay Lal’s Invisible Empires, the Natural History of Viruses, a text familiar to Galhotra, who said: “Whether or not we are there, this planet will be there. I just don’t want this planet to die.”

Menon presciently concluded the launch, citing German philosopher Walter Benjamin who wrote of the “angel of history” as helplessly piling wreckage on wreckage in the face of a violent storm called progress.

Against the light, Galhotra’s work, with its interstices between rubble, takes on luminosity. A lone wasp explores it: permanent home-building potential par excellence.

• Nirox is accessible to the public on weekends and public holidays between 10am and 4pm. “Future Fables” is now part of its permanent display. niroxarts.com