The imaginings of our future

Mon 17 Mar 2025

Rithika Merchant’s distinctive paintings — on display in the Asia Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery, the interactive project within the Children's Art Centre at the Gallery of Modern Art, or around the city streets of Brisbane — imagine otherworldly futures in which new worlds, creatures and relationships have evolved after Earth becomes uninhabitable. ‘Beings’ inhabit these future contexts as central characters, surrounded by botanical and anthropomorphic symbols, and Merchant speculates on how their values, beliefs, technologies and relationships to their new worlds might develop to shape new planets to be more habitable.

Temporal Structures 2023

In The Pollinator (illustrated), a being grasps the stems of a pollen-rich plant, alluding to engineered pollination as a means of vegetative propagation and engineered cosmogony. Regolith (illustrated) is based on the idea of ant colonies and their ability to self-organise and communicate through their own ecosystem. Vimana (illustrated) shows a wondrous flying chariot based on ideas in the ancient Hindu Vedas and Jain Agamas texts. Inspired by how humpback whales sustain themselves with stored food over long migrations, Silo (illustrated) depicts a character encased in a whale-like shape filled with supplies.

In offering a very different vision of what a distant future might look like, Merchant alludes to the grim reality of our current environmental state, questioning the conventions and relationships that have come to threaten it.

The Pollinator 2023

Regolith 2023

Vimana 2023

Silo 2023

Children's Art Centre

During Asia Pacific Triennial Kids, Rithika Merchant invites children to envision a new world in If the Seeds Chose Where to Grow 2024 (illustrated), the project builds on the idea of terraforming, also known as ‘Earth-shaping’, which is the theoretical process of changing the atmosphere and topology of a planet or celestial body to sustain human life.

Merchant’s large-scale projection of a mountainous environment with a constellation-filled sky invites you to help shape a new world. By selecting small blocks printed with different motifs of plants, beings and celestial elements that can be placed onto a glass tabletop to transform this imagined landscape and its immediate environment.

As the sky slowly transitions from dawn to dusk to a starry sky, the plants grow and the figures come to life. Merchant hopes that her project for children ‘plants a seed and helps them see that the future could hold many different possibilities and that they themselves could possibly have a hand in shaping it’.

If the Seeds Chose Where to Grow 2024

Brisbane City Council's Outdoor Gallery

Rithika Merchant's If the Seeds Chose Where to Grow Outdoor Gallery presented in collaboration with QAGOMA’s Children’s Art Centre transforms Brisbane's city streets and parks into imaginative spaces with vitrines, banners, and evening projections.

Edited extract from the publication The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, 2024

Art that feels like home
Asia Pacific Triennial
30 November 2024 – 27 April 2025
Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)
Brisbane, Australia
Free entry