My conspiracy theorist friend Mitra—bitter as 90 percent Lindt chocolate—thinks that words used repeatedly lose their potency. As has happened to once-celebrated words such as “sustainable development,” “multiculturalism,” “Y2K generation,” “liminal,” “metaphysics,” “post-human,” and “mansplaining.” Overuse of these words has rendered them irrelevant.
New terms have to be constantly produced, otherwise you would sound like an old hippie. Mithra wonders who comes up with these words and in what Circumstances.
Some words, such as “agency,” “embodiment,” “interrogating power structures,” and “democratising dissent,” are fast reaching their expiry dates. You know it when they start popping up in TED Talks
Normally, I wouldn’t care, but I, too, have to write proposals. And proposals have to have keywords.
In life, I have written just one good proposal; the rest are just the results of a lifetime of cut-and-paste jobs
A Pakistani comedian once talked about how leftovers of today’s chicken korma become tomorrow's pulao and the day after’s chicken paratha roll.
Same story with proposals.
In the life of a freelancer, 90 percent consists of writing proposals; 20 percent is chasing money; 10 percent is writing invoices; 30 percent is networking, and 2 percent is actual creative labor
Even books have started looking like proposals. Time to make peace with Chat GPT
Sarnath Banerjee, Cemetery of Dead Words 04, 2025. © and courtesy of the artist
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Hailed as the foremost Indian comic book writer since his graphic novel Corridor (2004), Calcutta-raised, Berlin-based Sarnath Banerjee has evolved into a globetrotting visual critic with post-colonial wit in the eerily imperialist order of a neo-liberal third millennium. A self-described "sideways reporter of insignificant things," he is an affable commentator on the quotidian, a recorder of the pedestrian, and a believer in the importance of the mundane, bringing minor stories into greater narrative frames to measure up to history.
Reflecting on his profoundly relational work, he has said that it "doesn't exist in isolation" and that "the reader is very much part of the work." Putting his words into practice, Banerjee has devised a vast multimedia installation for the 13th Berlin Biennale. The work combines drawing and audio, on the structures of typical newspaper stands found in India's public spaces.
Entitled Critical Imagination Deficit, it is a testament to Banerjee's diagnosis of a fleeting era of intellectual dominance-a crisis in Euro-American hegemonic power structures, the symptoms of which he may have keenly observed from his German home. As bold as it is modest and as ambitious as the comic often deceptively is-how might Banerjee's Critical Imagination Deficit stand up on a musealized street? Or could it, in fact, only exist there? Could the piece withstand the confrontation with the street? I believe it would, and hope that by doing so, it will restore what the artist terms "political being and imaginative flight."
━ Claire Tancons
Seen at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, as part of Passing the Fugitive On, the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, on view until September 14, 2025.
Claire Tancons is a curator and scholar invested in the discourse and practice of the postcolonial politics of production and exhibition.
