MUMBAI.- Display is presenting the exhibition Pinch your Thumb and Three Fingers, by the Bombay based artist Neha Kudchadkar, that features “Hand Job”, conceived during her stay at the Künstlerhaus Stadttöpferei Neumünster. The exhibition is made in partnership with Mumbai Art Room and Pro Helvetia - Swiss Art Council, in the frame of the curatorial lab and residency. In that context, both the artist Neha Kudchadkar and the curator Marie DuPasquier, as well as Display and Mumbai Art Room engaged a collaboration considered to be the beginning of a longer conversation.
Pinch your thumb and three fingers, tip, scroll, double tap, smart zoom in and out, rotate, swipe, open, drag, spread. The multi-touch manual will teach you effectively how to develop new fingertip abilities and adopt gestures or communication skills to navigate the haptic system of our black screen devices. How formed or deformed are the digits and palms of our hands? Can human beings adapt to being in touch without touching?
Neha Kudchadkar, through her work “Hand Job”, grasps the tactile-kinesthetic relationship between bodies and objects, technological devices, that populate our daily life and intimate spheres. In her practice, she works predominantly with clay and creates objects, extensions of her body, ready to be used and added to a potential augmented body. Ceramic has long accompanied humankind in the history of technology, as from antique craft and means of construction to being a component of industrial engineering, it joined the most sophisticated equipment that compose our mobile devices. Even as the artist acknowledges this, her corporeal engagement with the material to shape the ceramic tools allows her to imprint her digits and trace her own experience.
Bound but not restricted to this particular medium, with the sensitive materiality and movement that her work implies, she opens her practice up to other roles and media such as photography, performance or video. She moves through the numerous boundaries of geographical and political spaces, through those of gender and culture, to lay across them, to connect and open a dialogue within disciplines on materiality and the body. Pinch your Thumb and Three Fingers is a sensitive and intimate contact zone in which Neha Kudchadkar fleshes out the portrait of our human condition; an exhibition on connectivity.
Neha Kudchadkar is a visual and performing artist currently based in Mumbai. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, London, and the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.U. Baroda. She is a recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship and the Junior Fellowship, Government of India. She has chosen to negotiate various roles – dancer, ceramicist, researcher, teacher, choreographer, administrator, collaborator – that inform one another and broaden her approach as an artist and maker. Neha places herself in her social, political, material, cultural, and physical environment through her work - sometimes playful, sometimes somber. She often uses her body as the subject and object of her work and as a tool for the making of it. www.nehakudchadkar.com
Marie DuPasquier is a Swiss independent curator and museologist, active between Zürich and Berlin. She graduated in History of Art and Museology at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. For several years, she has been associate curator and administrator at Maison d’Ailleurs, Museum for science-fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys and was president of the Biel/Bienne Photography Festival in Switzerland. Although her work recalls photography, contemporary art, science-fiction, museum- and curatorial studies, it also reflects her curiosity for a transmedia and transdisciplinary approach. She is director of Display, a space for art and curatorial experimental practices in Berlin. She focuses on experimenting curation, exhibition design and devices and is engaged in questioning image systems, investigating the positions, movements and relationships of the different actors and bodies in the space and considering the digital universes. She is currently initiating the curatorial research Contemporary Bodies, for 2018-2019, supported by Pro Helvetia – Swiss art Council which will be the base of a series of exhibition in Display, Berlin Germany, Switzerland, India and Belgium in 2018-2019. www.display-berlin.com
The Mumbai Art Room. Founded in 2011 by American curator Susan Hapgood, the Mumbai Art Room exhibits contemporary art, design, and visual culture from around the world and provides a noncommercial platform for artistic and curatorial practice, one that is experimental, educational, and as accessible as possible to all audiences. The Mumbai Art Room is officially registered as the Contemporary Arts Trust with the Charity Commissioner's Office of the State of Maharashtra. Some highlights of the last six years of programming have been Nathalie Djurberg: I Found Myself Alone, 2011, curated by Susan Hapgood; Sammlung Ludwig: Art of the Sixties & Hans Haacke: The Chocolate Master , 2011, curated by David Platzker (now curator of the Museum of Modern Art , New York); Justin Ponmany: Inward Clearing , 2014-15, curated by Zasha Colah; and Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case , 2015-16, with Zuleikha Chaudhari, curated by Nida Ghouse. The trustees of the Mumbai Art Room are Diana Campbell Betancourt (Chair), Gaurav Bhatia, Susan Hapgood (Founder), Roohi Jaikishan, Shanay Jhaveri, Gayatri Rangachari Shah, and Tarbir Shahpuri.
