A World in the City. Zoological and Botanic Gardens

Traveling and exploring the world has always enabled us to meet different peoples, to encounter different cultures and spaces, and to collect artefacts and take them into other contexts. These collections have been used to entertain and to educate, whether in private and feudal collections, the great exhibitions, or today’s zoological and botanic gardens. They shape the ways in which we see the world. By collecting, documenting and reproducing we hope to understand the world and its manifold forms of life and diverse cultures. Curator Kaiwan Mehta has invited Jitish Kallat, Sonia Mehra Chawla, Sahej Rahal, Shelagh Keeley and author Ruth Padel to address this 'world in the city'. They explore the stories and the practices of entertainment and knowledge production, and of artistic documentation and reproduction in the context of zoological and botanical gardens. 

In these places, plants, animals, buildings, objects and people from different geographical, climatic, cultural and social contexts all come together. This 'world in the city' makes it possible to experience and reflect on a 'culture of we', one of ifa's main themes in the year 2017, in all its diversity, with all its limitations, and with all the opportunities it brings.