The show deals with the social history of science and the way the practice of science is deeply implicated / contextualised within larger discourses of power and knowledge systems. It is also about dealing with the 'inheritance' of discourses like Orientalism or Stalinism and finding ways of engaging critically with that legacy. At one level, the show title can be parsed as an allusion to the centrality of language in this entire process. It is also a reference to the phrase 'Inheritance of Acquired Characters', a popular one-liner on Lamarkism, an influential early 19th century theory of evolution that was discredited by the Darwinian-Mendelian paradigm. Through out this show, multiple modalities - video and spoken word performance to artist's books and large-scale digital prints - have been deployed in arriving at the formal articulation of the larger conceptual engagement.

Abhishek Hazra

2009