LONDON.- The Hayward Gallery Project Space presents an exhibition by multimedia artist Neha Choksi, marking her first solo show in the UK.
The wide-ranging practice of Neha Choksi (b. 1973, lives and works in Los Angeles and Mumbai) comprises short films, photographs, performance and sculptural works that depict scenarios of erasure, exhaustion, detachment and disappearance. Minds to Lose, the artist’s exhibition for the Hayward Gallery Project Space, features her Trilogy on Absenting (2007–13): a series of recent video works exploring absence and evanescence through events that unfold slowly over time, together with a new performance work developed for the exhibition.
Each of the video works that make up the trilogy – Leaf Fall, Minds to Lose and Iceboat – depicts the carrying out of a single proposition, described by the artist as ‘invented rituals’. Leaf Fall (2007–08) records the stripping of a peepul tree’s foliage over the course of a single day, in order to isolate a lone autumnal sprig, while Minds to Lose (2008–11) charts the anaesthetization of the artist alongside that of a sheep, donkey and two goats. Both animals and human are depicted as they slowly succumb to the effect of the sedatives. All are temporarily united in the shared experience of absence and the loss of consciousness.
Iceboat (2012–13) documents the artist rowing a boat made of ice on a lake, the melting vessel eventually releasing her into its waters. Choksi undertakes these absurdist acts as a way of exploring philosophical questions of existence. ‘I am creating ‘boundary situations’, Choksi has said of the Trilogy, ‘events, where the change in state from before to after occurs. The truth drawn out is a certain human freedom to experience that emptiness and loss.’
A new performance work, In Leaf (Primary Time), sees the artist painting three trees in their entirety in blue, red and yellow respectively over the course of the day of the exhibition’s opening. The trees remain in the space as remnants of this action, while a video plays back the event captured in detail throughout the exhibition’s duration. ‘There is often an element of the absurd and the traumatic in my projects’ operations and this work is no exception,’ notes Choksi. ‘It uses the ideas of absence and abeyance to tease out iterations of our tragic-comic relationships with the natural world.’
Neha Choksi: Minds To Lose is curated by Eimear Martin, Hayward Gallery Assistant Curator, assisted by Debra Lennard, Hayward Gallery Curatorial Assistant.
Neha Choksi (b. 1973, United States) received her MA in Classics from Columbia University, NY in 2000 and her dual BAs in Greek and in Art from UCLA in 1997. Choksi’s oeuvre presents a materially bound search for and acceptance of absences and emptyings. Whether sculpture, video, photography or performance, her art takes matter apart in substance and form, in metaphor and media. Her art focuses presence through reduction and erasure in order to lay bare the longing and liberation accompanying physical and temporal losses; survival matters. She often makes tragicomic, even absurd, interventions – in the life of a plant, an animal, or her own – and in so doing trespasses on the vulnerability, intimacy and isolation that are experienced. Additionally, Choksi’s works often carry an interest in commonsense gravity and in the stillness that accrues in time and space to the things of this world. These themes recur in the various formats in which she works, whether it is a performance piece in which she anesthetized herself and four farm animals; a video showing the denuding of a large tree in a single day; or an installation of vases full of flowers supporting the crushing weight of a mattress. Her works all approach absence through an excess of gesture and of presence. Her works have been exhibited worldwide in galleries, museums, festivals, and film screenings and are in notable public and private collections. She is a contributing editor for X-TRA. She recently moved to Los Angeles and is currently teaching at California Institute of the Arts.
