RAISON d’état

My intrigue towards science, history and the constant pursuit of ways to blend my passion for both photography and biology lead me to create this project, Raison d’état

The fear of physical degeneracy of race saw the birth of Social Darwinism and Eugenics in the 19th century. Statistician Francis Galton drew on his cousin Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and argued that human societies were preventing natural selection or the survival of the fittest by protecting the sick, the poor and the weak through welfare programmes, charity and medicine. He described the science as the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations and called it Eugenics.

The installation symbolises the Karyotype, the complete set of chromosomes in a species or in an individual organism. Just as chromosomes carry genetic information, these negatives convey the heinous crimes committed by the state under the shadow of the evolution of the human race. The contribution of the Rockefeller Foundation to Eugenics’ initiatives of sterilizing nearly 15,000,000 people in 1915, the setting up of the American Eugenics Society in 1926, the Lynching incidents in the USA in 1930s, Aktion T4 in Nazi Germany in 1940, sterilization initiatives in India during the Emergency in 1975 are a few examples that have been showcased here.