Artist Neha Choksi is showing a solo in Mumbai after eight years. Titled ‘Porous Earth’, the exhibition at Project 88, Colaba, comprises sculptures made of stone, glass and ‘air’, and is an ambitious enquiry around the relationships between materiality, space, time. Her long multi-disciplinary practice, spanning more than two decades, has included sculpture, performance and video (Leaf Fall and Iceboat are among her better-known works), in the series on display she has worked primarily with rocks—a material that has become a focal point in recent years.
While sculptors have chiseled into stone since time immemorial for creative expression, Choksi seems more interested in using the geological remnants as conduits to investigate underlying existential questions of who we are and why we exist—thereby connecting the primordial with the contemporary.
What you get are shafts of glass stabbed into stone, rocks pulverized into fine pigment, bubbles of air and fine rock fragments floating in cast glass, and arrangements of exposed innards of rocks that have been meticulously drilled into—all effects which are both violent and poetic, ostensibly material yet deeply metaphysical.
