The Elemental You
October 15, 2024 @ 10:30 am - January 9, 2025 @ 6:30 pm IST
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. 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.
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.
This exhibition is part of KNMA’s ongoing research and collection-building on South Asian diaspora artists. 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.