Born in the United States and raised in India, Neha Choksi spends her time working as an artist in both Mumbai and Los Angeles.
She has exhibited and performed in galleries and festivals around the world, including at the Hayward Gallery Project Space, London, at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India, the Frestas Sorocaba Triennale in Brazil, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, the Shanghai Biennale, the Asia Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery, and the Kristianstads Konsthall, Sweden, among other places. Additionally, her works have been selected twice for the Sculpture Park at the Frieze Art Fair, and were included in the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale.
Her last installation, The Sun’s Rehearsal, and the accompanying performance in collaboration with dancer Alice Cummins, In Memory of the Last Sunset, 2016, opened this March and will continue into May as part of Sydney’s 20th Biennale.
The invitation to her solo show, Save the Translation for Later, currently on exhibition in the city was accompanied by an intriguing lyrical passage that touched upon the concepts of exposure, presence, revelation, and connection. There’s a delicate tension maintained throughout; one line says, “There is me and there is a whole world of yous. / We are all solitary.”
Edited excerpts from an interview with the artist who uses performance as a medium to explore ideas that she struggles with in daily life:
What are you bringing to your solo show Save the Translation for Later?
I am trying to efface preliminary explanations in favour of direct experience. I don’t want to tell people what to expect or what to think.
This ties into a more philosophical if idiosyncratic point that this exhibition is a modest contribution to, which is about the relation between who speaks and who listens, who has power and what is affected, between the external world and me, between me and you variously, but in very material terms, for example my touching a plant with paint filled hands.
You’ve used a range of mediums to communicate your vision in the past: photography, painting, performance, sculpture and video. What leads you to make the choices you do?
I guess I’ve been thinking about one series of works since 2003 and it made sense to pursue it now as a result of the performance I had done in London last year. The latter was very much about how art deals with landscapes, about touching a plant (with paint) and failing to access its plantness (through paint). And that led me to thinking about barriers and access and portals and communication. And let to the new performance piece [at the show’s opening], and led to me revisiting the woodcut series that I had started in 2003, from which comes the image in the invitation to the show. Things percolate over time, and brew into unexpected flavours and scents that are haunted by the past and influenced by the now at the same time. I like that new works don’t always follow a linear path from the last work one does, even if the underlying concerns remain the same. I tend to work in fairly conventional media for similar reasons, I like the history embedded in them.
You eschew complacency when you take on vulnerable positions in your art. In 2008 at the Khoj Live Performance festival in New Delhi you had your body sedated and unconscious during the show. In Iceboat, which is a video of a performance in February, you were on a boat made of ice and sank slowly into a lake. How does this personal vulnerability affect you as artist?
I do the things I do in order to live the life I want to, and that includes the performances. They are heightened situations and absurd interventions to explore ideas that I am grappling with in my daily life and to generate thought about the kind of life we all want to lead, individually and collectively.
Save the Translation for Later will show at Project 88 till June 5
The author is a freelance writer
