This is me as the curator of the exhibition finding myself, leading on a journey, sharing my vulnerability, and inviting visitors along the way. What holds us, makes us, carries us, now, in near and long precarious futures, I ask myself these questions as well as question the viewers,” says Akansha Rastogi, as she takes you around Kiran Nadar Museum of Art’s (KNMA) new exhibition—The Elemental You—in Saket, Delhi. Aimed to be a ‘slow’ exhibition, it provokes and encourages the viewers to pace down and engage with the works by three South Asian diaspora artists, Simryn Gill, Neha Choksi and Hajra Waheed.
The project is layered with the larger framework of collection-building exercise aligning exhibition-making as a method to do so. Commenting specifically on the presentation of the three practices, Rastogi admits that it is an unusual intertwining and yet the works complement each other.
The three artists explore the geological, cultural, and material aspects of our planet, with a specific focus on care and consciousness. Rastogi elaborates, for instance, Port Dickson, Gill’s hometown in Malaysia is a recurring theme in different ways in her work. “She has been documenting and working on it for decades. Its shores, mangroves, abandoned gardens, plantations, market places, inside private spaces of its inhabitants…all of it,” she says. In the exhibit, however, all three of the artists are addressing and engaging with the natural world around them.
Gill’s works open up the cultural politics of embodying, how people become the landscape where they live, how geography become people, the complex processes of being and becoming one with the things around us—animate, alive, or dead. One may wonder then, when a tree is brought to the ground, does it remain a tree? For Rastogi, the kind of material that opens up in this exhibition is varied. “With Gill’s Eyes and Storms, Hajra’s Strata 1-24, Choksi’s Porous Earth, the geological timescale touched is huge, it is like the deep time of matter and making of the Earth itself,” she explains.
Gill talks about her work titled Clearing. “A fallen tree lets you get up close, touch crevices, run your hands along parts you would otherwise not have been able to get to in such grounded comfort; you can minutely and slowly investigate where branches divide and smooth bark creases and folds….” It is a large, multi-part work of which we have three photograms in the KNMA collection that are presented in this exhibition. The fragile photograms are based on inner parts of a 110-year-old Canary Island palm tree that had to be uprooted from the compound of a museum in Australia because of an expansion project.
Curatorially, these three intertwining pathways in the exhibition come directly from the words and references in the works of the three artists. These are not definitive sections or thematic structures in the exhibition, but more like conceptual, as well as practical methods to allow the exhibition to speak to the viewers. Rastogi says,
“Sometimes acting as guiding principles, to bear in mind as one walks through and unfolds the works, they become noticeable, overlay, merge and often get lost too. In certain works, they are too strongly present.” For instance, Choksi explains, “In the video project Dust to Mountain, I sequentially kick dust and sand, pebbles and gravel, and eventually a mountain in a dialectic between thinking like a rock vs Dickinson’s line—‘brain is wider than the sky’. I am working with this dichotomy in this work.”
Waheed conversely offers the paradigm of ‘survival as revival’ in her profound and breathtaking video work The Spiral. She says, “The Spiral is much more than just a form. Universal and ubiquitous, centrifugal and centripetal, representing both growth and decay, spirals are one of the most widespread forms found in nature. It grants us insight into the consciousness of self and the expansion of this awareness outwards—a springboard for reflecting on individual upheaval and collective human experience.”
The film builds on Waheed’s existing practice of mapping patterns of colonial and state violence, acting as a meditation on change while reminding us of the importance of maintaining the long view, especially in relation to social transformation
The exhibition is simple, quiet and straight-forward, and yet deeply conceptual. In the gallery where you see Naga Doodles, you also see other examples of Gill rubbings with ink and colour. She encourages our eye to hover on the details that capture the textures, the punctured parts of its body, and body fluids staining the paper.
In Hajra’s works you can feel the heat, the temperature, tautness of each sheet of paper she put under the sun for different durations. Climate and environmental degradation are a concurrent narrative in all the works and bind the exhibition together.
When & Where
The Elemental You; Till January 9, 2025; KNMA, Saket, Delhi