CARBON

The backbone of life, the hardest substance on earth, and the villain of the climate crisis: carbon has more than one story.

Most people only meet carbon in the context of climate change. CARBON reintroduced it as a fundamental framework for life, making the familiar unfamiliar while asking questions about our exploitative relationship with the natural world.

Over six months, 30+ exhibits, a food festival and film screenings opened many doors into carbon. Before the new building opened, pop-up exhibitions in Bengaluru's metro stations turned daily commutes into moments of science, and a Summer School on Carbon ran in the lead-up.

Carbon is not the villain

There is an urgent call to decarbonise: to sink and sequester the carbon we have pumped into the atmosphere in the name of development. But that framing pushes aside the vital role carbon plays in the relationships between practically all forms of life and non-life.

The exhibition moved through carbon's many lives: as coal, charcoal and diamond; as the petroleum that fuels our economies; as graphene, nanotubes and buckyballs; as the carbohydrate in your favourite snack; and as the measure by which we date the past. An advisory group of Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Dolly Kikon and Victor Seow helped us hold the chemistry, the history and the politics together.

Exhibition-in-a-Box

A portable, tabletop version of the exhibition for classrooms. It holds materials to build your own versions of the artworks and set them up as a mini exhibition, plus experiments and activities that build on the ideas behind each exhibit, so complex ideas become tangible for young learners.

CREDITS & SUPPORT

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