Medium: Single channel video | Duration: 12 min, 58 sec | Year: 2009
Exhibition Details: First exhibited at On Certainty, a group show curated by Rit Premnath at Bose Pacia, New York
Radio Jena is an attempt to map the sprawling presence of German Romanticism in the historical hinterland that frames the lovely beachfront property that is ‘Spiritual India of Yogic contortions’. The radio correspondent G.W.F Haeckel is a fictional hybrid of the philosopher Hegel and the influential mid nineteenth century naturalist and Darwinian ‘evangelist’ Ernst Haeckel.
While Hegel tracked the teleological development of the world spirit from its Asian childhood to its Germanic maturity, Haeckel compared the developmental stages of various animal embryos to formulate a highly anthropocentric version of Darwinian evolution. The textual extracts that appear between pseudo-medical renderings of Haeckel’s embryological drawings are unedited sound bytes from Hegel’s The Philosophy of History.