On Sunday morning, India’s contemporary art industry woke up to rumours and then confirmations of the ghastly murder of Hema Upadhyay (and her lawyer). Most of us didn’t know of news reports about bodies found in boxes the day before. Most of us don’t deal with reality in this business.
I met Hema during my time at a now defunct gallery, and remember being impressed — not just by her work, which we all must see more of now — but by her straightforwardness, her refusal to be swayed by the shiny things we offered.
We offered because Hema would’ve been worth it, not just fiscally, but because her art spoke volumes about diaspora, longing and memory, which came from growing up in a family that lived through the Partition.
Her move to Mumbai in 1998 after completing her Masters from MS University Baroda made her think of her family’s migration from Pakistan, which in turn made her think of the thousands of migrant workers that pass unknown through the city, create micro cities within their slums, live lives outside of our cushy ones.
These concerns came together in her first solo show at Gallery Chemould (then in its original location in Jehangir Art Gallery) titled ‘Sweet Sweat Memories’ in the form of mixed-media paintings in which she squarely placed herself as the migrant in an overwhelming/overwhelmed city. Then there was a letter to her mother, ‘The Space Between You And Me’ (2002), spelled out by plants sprouting from the seeds she planted in the ground, a meditation on love, impermanence and the need to tend it so it may stay.
She also created ‘Dream a Wish’ in 2004, first as an installation inside the Grand Hyatt Mumbai, a disruption that reflected the slums and chawls surrounding the five-star hotel and then in multiple forms including an impressive sprawl at Lille, France (2006), and a more controlled semi-public installation at Maker Maxity, where slums (migrants) take over a globe hanging overhead.
During a residency in Karachi, Pakistan, Hema created another series of exacting, massive objects, person-sized chandeliers made of thousands of matchsticks, exploring the ideas of religion, beauty and violence existing hand-in-hand between the two countries.
Her work has been shown by museums across the world including the Hangar Bicocca, Milan, MACRO, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma, Rome, the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem and Centre Pompidou.
Her last solo showing, ‘Fish in a Dead Landscape’ last year at Chemould Prescott Road took on a more personal intensity. Combining techniques from ‘Dream A Wish’ and other past works, the show was an unselfconscious portrayal of the additional displacement she felt at the end of her marriage.
‘She was a force of nature’, someone messaged me, amid a flurry of sadness and speculation. This is the only thing I will take away from today, because if there is someone whose voice will live on through their work, it’s Hema Upadhyay. Look her up.
(The author is an art writer)
