For Frieze London 2024, our booth presents a curation of works that reckon with the materiality of nature and being - its corporeality, tangibility, emotional contours, and uncanny remnants. As you enter, Neha Choksi’s immersive sculptural installation, Strata Bouquet (uncertain allies) marks her engagement with rock, stone, and the process of extraction, foregrounding the invisible forces of tension and gravity, weight and balance. This work depicts a collapse of time, space, and scale, rendered possible by multiple interventions; as such, Choksi disturbs our assumptions regarding the organic and the manufactured by penetrating the solidity of a rock.
In contrast, Rohini Devasher’s hypnotic archival prints - over which, the artist laboriously notates, draws, paints, and erases - begin as an attempt to document the abyss of our night sky. However, Borrowed Light is simultaneously an invitation to look (and think) deeper - for marked with signs and unclear coordinates, Devasher's works become alternative maps of the light of the skies and stars as she saw them, using objects we can see to understand the ones we cannot.
Whereas Choksi and Devasher explore the elemental, Amol K Patil and Prajakta Potnis infuse materiality with the politics of everyday life. Patil’s sculptures occupy an eerie realm, as a corporeal body - fragmented and obscured - is inscribed inside the material debris immanent to urban redevelopment, but cast in bronze. Potnis’ sculpture excavates an actual site of debris, for the artist salvages a slice of wall from a recently demolished house. She delicately layers this concrete with found materials - paint peels, a cut out table-mat, embroidery - forging an ode to the elusive textures of memory itself.
Ashwini Bhat’s biomorphic ceramic sculptures evoke a different kind of memory, one of nostalgia, motherhood and the recurring relation between our bodies and nature. Her works strike a parallel conversation with Mahesh Baliga’s landscapes, as he captivates your gaze with his gentle, painterly interventions on time, light, nature, wilderness, and the self.
