KNMA’s Newest Exhibition, ‘The Elemental You’
The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art presents ‘The Elemental You,’ the first in a series dedicated to the practices of South Asian diaspora artists, curated by Akansha Rastogi. The exhibition initiates a critical dialogue among the works of three artists: Simryn Gill, Neha Choksi, and Hajra Waheed. The show started on 15th October 2024 and will continue till 9th January 2025.
Video Installation, 7 min 10 sec.
Photo Credit: Toni Hafkenschied
Featuring substantial bodies of work from each artist, the exhibition explores 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 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 delves deeper into their nuanced politics of being and becoming, embodying and effacing, and wrestling with the abstraction of beinghood, things, and 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.
C-print, Set of 40
Courtesy – KNMA
It is 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 highlight the Earth’s past geological changes and processes visible in the present, the ageing sun, and the warming planet. Visitors may find themselves revisiting specific geographies such as Simryn Gill’s industrial port town Port Dickson in Malaysia, which she has been documenting since 1993. Similarly, Hajra Waheed’s meticulous explorations of the night sky and Kashmir’s sky draw attention to its fleeting yet constant presence in the everyday.
Video, sound, sheer fabric curtain
Courtesy – Neha Choksi and Project 88, Mumbai
The exhibition straddles the boundary between the human and the more-than-human, exploring modes of being, environmental discourse, and the temporal measurements of life. The visitors enter a deceptively quiet and simple space of alarming beauty, of the holes created by mines, mangroves, dead snakes, stones and mountains; a space of resilience of surfaces, materials and people. As they traverse this space, they engage with the artist’s works as a looker, digger, archivist, tinkerer of the mundane and the earthly and an interventionist and observer of a peculiar kind in the natural world.
Silver gelatin photograph, Set of five
Courtesy – KNMA
At the heart of the exhibition is ‘The Working Space’, which presents two special projects – by Vijai Maia Patchineelam and Ranjana Dave, alongside an Artists’ Roundtable that includes rotating interventions by five artists. The Roundtable converges around themes of grounding, immersion, repetition, field visits, tools, landscape, record-taking, micro-stories, rubbings and the transfer of intimate traces of objects onto surfaces, and many parallel universes. Each artist occupies the metaphorical Roundtable in succession, sharing the entanglements and transformations occurring in their ever-changing environments, to intersect with the rest of the exhibition.
The Elemental You is accompanied by a catalogue, a toolkit to navigate the exhibition, and an extensive public program that includes field visits with geologists, tours to nurseries in New Delhi, performances, film screenings and a one-day film festival, conversations with artists, workshops and coursework on artists’ archives, care and “the pedagogy of unwellness” inspired by Mimi Khuc’s book ‘dear elia.’ The exhibition and the public programs are curated by Akansha Rastogi, Senior Curator, Exhibitions and Programming at KNMA, with colleagues Avik Debdas, Swati Kumari, Chinmoy Deori and Mahika Banerjee.
Moonlight To Reach Us? Just Over One Second. And
Sunlight? Eight Minutes. (2019)
Courtesy – Mor Charpentier
Kiran Nadar, Founder and Chairperson of KNMA comments: “We are thrilled to present this timely exhibition that speaks to degrading environmental conditions and the history of the earth. Rooted in the museum collection, it expands outward with seminal works on loan. The exhibition learns from and showcases the inspiring practices of Simryn Gill, Neha Choksi and Hajra Waheed. Together, we hope to open discussions around their work, writings, impulses and visions.”
About Simryn Gill
Simryn Gill’s methods include photography, drawing, sculpture, making collections, and writing and publishing. The materials and process she works with are often simple: used, or discarded everyday things, plants and texts, which might be pressed, printed, glued, scanned, or torn, to make works that meditate on habitation—our place inside and outside places—in history, in geography and language. Simryn Gill has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Singapore, London, New South Wales, Melbourne, Berlin, London, Victoria, New York, Lund, and Venice.
About Neha Choksi
In work across and beyond performance, moving images, and sculpture, Neha Choksi probes lived experiences that negotiate relationships in unconventional settings. Harnessing stone to plant, animal to friends, public to philosophy, Choksi’s materially bound art engages the terms of our existence in ways personal and planetary. Choksi’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States, Asia, Australia, the UK, and Europe for nearly three decades.
About Hajra Waheed
Hajra Waheed’s multidisciplinary practice ranges from painting and drawing to video, sound, sculpture and installation. Amongst other issues, she explores the nexus between security, surveillance and the covert networks of power that structure lives, while also addressing the traumas and alienation of displaced subjects affected by legacies of colonial and state violence. Characterized by a distinct visual language and unique poetic approach, her works often use the ordinary as a means to convey the profound, and landscape as a medium to transpose human struggle and a radical politics of resistance and resilience. Waheed has participated in exhibitions in Vienna, Dublin, Berlin, Sharjah, Missouri, Athens, Montreal, Paris, Pakistan, London, Toronto, South Korea, Ithaca, and, Barcelona.
About Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) opened its doors to the public in January 2010. It is a pioneering private museum of Modern and Contemporary art in South Asia, with two spaces located in New Delhi and Noida. It is a not-for-profit institution with an extensive and creative engagement with exhibition-making, educational and public-focused programs, and publications. The museum houses a growing collection of more than 10,000 artworks from South Asia, with a focus on the historical trajectories of 20th-century Indian art, alongside the experimental practices of young contemporaries.
Image – Neha Choksi, Release imperfect from every pore (Detail), 2023-2024, Limestone dust in kiln cast glass, limestone, from Porous Earth series; Courtesy – KNMA
