The Elemental You a three person exhibition with Simryn Gill, Hajra Waheed, and Neha Choksi, opens tonight at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi, curated by Akansha Rastogi.
Featuring substantial bodies of work from each artist, the exhibition begins with an exploration of the element 'Earth' as a geological, cultural and material experience. For decades, the three artists have engaged with rocks, stones, sand, plants, trees, fruits, light, animals and other beings as subjects and materials for their art, focusing on their multifaceted relationship with the natural world. Most of the works in the exhibition are the artists' life-long projects or long-term commitments to specific ideas, materials, and methods. This unique layering of their distinct oeuvres is an opportunity to delve deeper into their nuanced politics of being and becoming, embodying and effacing, and wrestling with the abstraction of beinghood, things, non-things.
The planetary, the geological and the personal intersect in the exhibition, to reach another drawn landscape and a distinct emotional horizon. Inspired by the artists' thoughts, references, and writings, 'The Elemental You' unfolds along three intertwined pathways - i) to think like a mountain, ii) survival as revival, and iii) clearing.
This is a slow exhibition—a slumbering space that transcends human experience, navigating through aeons, eras, days, and decades—marking time as the unit of contemplation. Neha Choksi’s works bring attention to the Earth’s past geological changes and processes that are visible in the present, to the ageing sun and the warming planet.
