IAS Turbulence: Foreword

by Tamar Garb

Vivan Sundaram, Signs of Fire, 1984-85. © Vivan Sundaram. Courtesy of the artist.

 

What could be more turbulent than a virus, waging its invisible path through our habits: of life, of thought, of space and time? As I write this foreword from Lockdown London, I feel my routines turned upside down, my sense of distance and proximity collapse (never have those nearby seemed so remote and those faraway so close and connected) and my sense of time overturned (how long will this last? what is a long time now? how do we live without knowing where the beginning and the end reside?).

Thinking with turbulence seemed like such a good idea a couple of years ago when our lives (at least in the overdeveloped and privileged world) had a semblance of order. And it has unleashed so much wonderful speculation and thought, from accounts of scientific unpredictability and the joy of unknowability to the graphic inscription of cosmic forces and flows. Artists have gifted us with their images ranging from imaginary ruins and urban chaos culled from commodities and waste to recycled tropes and figures, seized and subverted from canonical histories and genres. Landscape and literature collide, science and fiction face off and up. ‘Turbulence’ serves as a force of iconoclastic upheaval, shifting stale paradigms and sedimented realities. Explosive, exploratory, experimental: it challenges and accosts our assumptions. There is no rest, whether of the earth’s surface or the mind’s depths. In a turbulent imaginary, conflict and contingency are all.

Thinking from our present moment, though, I feel humbled and awed, not only at the creative energy that has led to the production of this issue, but at the exponential rise of the stakes under discussion. We present it at a time when home and work environments have collapsed into one another, our bodies are besieged by sanitization and seclusion, our horizons have shrunk and our imaginations have soared, our anxieties, our fears, our hopes, all mixed in what can only feel like the most tumultuous of times. We had no idea when we set out that that we would be tested this way. Perhaps that’s what it means to live in turbulent times.