MUMBAI.- Chemould Prescott Road in collaboration with The Guild, Mumbai announces its solo exhibition How Perfect Perfection Can Be by Navjot Altaf.

The show at Chemould Prescott Road showcases a set of 24 watercolours, a medium Navjot returns to after nearly two decades. Her watercolors are based on the visual pleasure received from the scale and intricate details of glass buildings and other monoliths in New York city, but over which she superimposes line graphs of climate change and its impacts. Some of these graphs dictate / reveal the damage, running into billions of dollars, caused by extreme weather events that are increasing in frequency. One of the works has the exact degree of the concentration of Kyoto greenhouse gases from 1850 - 2015, plotted over a steel support structure. Another has the energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in the US and China between 1990 and 2012, snaking over an innocuous metal tipped gradient.

Navjot’s watercolours reveal our ironical desire not lust for architectural splendor - the massive concrete jungle rises on the debris of our collective failure as preservers of the global environment.

The title of the show How Perfect Perfection Can Be compels the viewers world over to contemplate their complicity in the aspirations for such structures, if not being directly responsible for them.

The exhibition also houses a video titled ‘Tana’ and parts of a loom installed as sculptural pieces. The video is an edited record with the focus on perfection and installed parts of the loom structure, signifies the perfection required in the process of sizing, warping (threads arranged length wise), of the threads and then weaving for which each thread has to be perfectly arranged.

This exhibition was first shown in 2015-2016 at The Guild, Alibaug, 1028, Ranjanpada, Next to Sai Mandir, Mandwa Alibaug Road, Alibaug.

Navjot moved to Mumbai in 1967 where she studied both fine and applied arts at the Sir J. J. School of Art. Since 1972 her paintings, sculptures, installations, video and site-specific works negotiate various disciplinary boundaries, reflecting her long-term preoccupation with social justice, knowledge systems, ecology and indigenous cultures. Her artistic imagery and conceptual concerns emerge from innovative syntheses of theoretical and methodological innovations, combined with deeply engaged readings of historical and contemporary art, film and cultural theory - grounded in the context of her long-term participant observation research and collaborative public art interventions among indigenous communities of the Adivasi in India’s tumultuous region of Bastar. She has also done site specific ecological art interventions in other locales, including work focused on innovating municipal practices for ecoconsciousness and managing of urban roadside trees in New Delhi and elsewhere.

Navjot has held a number of solo shows including, ‘How Perfect Perfection Can Be’, The Guild, Alibaug (2016) ‘Horn in the Head’, Talwar Gallery, New Delhi, India, (2013) ‘Touch IV’, 22 monitors video installation, Talwar Gallery, New Delhi, and The Guild, Mumbai, India (2010) ‘A Place in New York’, The Guild, Mumbai and New York (2009/2010), ‘Lacuna in ‘Testimony’, Frost Art Museum, Florida, USA (2009) ‘Touch 1, 2, 3 Remembering Altaf’ Sakshi Gallery,Mumbai (2008)- Bombay Shots’ The Guild, Mumbai, India (2007) `Water Weaving’ Talwar Gallery, New York, (2006) ‘Junction 1,2,3’ The Guild, Mumbai, (2006), ‘Jagar’Sakshi Gallery Mumbai, (2006) ‘Mumbai Meri Jaan’ and ‘Lacuna in Testimony’ Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, (2005) ‘In Response To’ Talwar Gallery, New York, ( 2003)‘Three Halves’ and ‘Displaced Self’, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, (2004).

Some of her recent participations include: 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016); Making Sense of Crisis - Art as Schizoanalysis : KHOJ, New Delhi, India (2015); ‘Dead Reckoning: Whorled Explorations’, Second Edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale,Kochi, India (2014); ‘Is it what you think?’, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India ( 2014); ‘Forms of Activism’, Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi India, (2014); ‘Rewriting the Landscape: India and China: Contemporary Art from China and India’, MMCA Korea (2013); ‘Water’, Europalia India Liege, Belgium, Germany, (2013); ‘Women In Between : Asian Women Artists 1984-2012’ Japan (2012/13); ‘Yamuna Elbe-Contemporary Flows, fluid times’, Hamburg and Delhi, ‘IN CONTEXT: Public Art Ecology’, New Delhi, (2010), ‘48%c Public Art and Ecology’ New Delhi (2008) ‘Public places Private Spaces’, Newark Museum New York, ‘Tiger By the Tail – Contemporary Indian Women Transforming Culture’ – Brandies Museum ,Boston, U.S.A. (2007), ‘Bombay Maximum City’, Lille, France, ‘Zones of Contact’ 15th Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006), ‘Groundworks’Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, U.S.A , ‘ZOOM – ART IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA’, Lisbon ,’Passage To India’, Geneva (2004) ‘SubTerrain-Indian Contemporary Art’, House Of World Culture, Berlin, ‘Eigth Havana Biennale’,Cuba (2003), ‘Century City’,Tate Modern London.(2001) and ‘First Fukuoka Asian Art Triennials’, Japan (1999).

The artist lives and works in Mumbai, Bastar and Janjira