In between you, the reader, and me, the writer, this screen – carrying words, images, thin sheets of glass. In between your opaque body and its reflection in a mirror, a transparent glass – forming different perceptions of viewing the self. In between two bodies, a cohabitation with an invisible-to-the-naked-eye virus – birthing the lack of touch. In this lack, an urgency and longing… If we were to really reach out to each other, when must touching through the glass become our only way to establish a moment of contact?
Earlier this year, Neha Choksi was invited to create a solo exhibition in Galerie Barbara Thumm’s experimental platform of New Viewings #37 curated by David Thorp. Incorporating a video and a series of finger paintings on glass, her work titled Urgency and Longing explores traces of connectivity that touch has to offer. In an interview with STIR, Choksi points that “the works for Urgency and Longing were made specifically for an online experimental exhibition platform that was erected for our time of continual COVID. Since I thrive on connections and interactions and friendships and hugs and grazing my eye and hand on everything illuminated by the sun, I had to absorb the fact that laptop and phone screens would be the interface for any online audience.”
