"What we do to the earth-body is what we do to each other."
— Natasha Ginwala, writer and curator
The exploration of Earth as an elemental, geological, cultural, and material experience is at the heart of The Elemental You, an exhibition currently on view at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi, that initiates a critical conversation between the long-term projects of artists Simryn Gill, Neha Choksi, and Hajra Waheed, featuring substantial bodies of work from each.
For decades, the three artists have engaged with rocks, stones, sand, plants, trees, fruits, light, and animals as subjects and materials for their art — focusing on their multifaceted relationship with time, memory, and the natural world. Most of the works in the exhibition are the artists' life-long projects or long-term explorations of specific ideas, materials, and methods at the intersection of the planetary, the geological, and the personal. This unique layering of their distinct bodies of work represents their nuanced politics of being and becoming, embodying and effacing, and wrestling with the abstraction of life.
The Elemental You is very much an experiential exhibition. Neha Choksi’s video installations bring to attention the Earth’s past geological changes and processes that are visible in the present, to the ageing sun, and the warming planet. In Simryn Gill's investigation and documentation of an industrial port town of Port Dickson in Malaysia, which she has been documenting since 1993, visitors find themselves revisiting specific geographies and times. 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.
As Akansha Rastogi points out in her curatorial note, the exhibition straddles the boundary between the human and the more-than-human, exploring different modes of being, environmental discourse, and the temporal measurements of life, including unwellness as a pedagogical tool and a chronic state — unwellness of the self and the planet. It invites visitors to enter a deceptively quiet and simple space of alarming beauty, of the holes created by mines, of mangroves, dead snakes, stones and mountains; a space of resilience of surfaces, materials and people. When they enter and explore this space, they engage with the works of the artist 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.
“We are thrilled to present this timely exhibition that speaks to degrading environmental conditions and the history of the earth.”Kiran Nadar, Founder and Chairperson of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi
The Elemental You is part of KNMA's ongoing research and collection-building on South Asian diaspora artists. The exhibition, curated by Akansha Rastogi, 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 conversations with artists, workshops and coursework on the artists' archives, care, and 'the pedagogy of unwellness' inspired by Mimi Khuc's book 'dear elia'.
The Elemental You is on view at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, till January 9, 2025. Learn more about the exhibition here.
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