Urgency and Longing
2021
Solo exhibition
presented by the New Viewings online platform of Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
Curated with an essay by David Thorp
A series of new glass paintings take its conceptual, visual and color cues from Urgency and Longing (On the other side), a video work featuring an ironwood tree, glass, phone screens and fingers.
The exhibition with the curator’s essay is archived online here. The curator’s essay is also reproduced in full below. A feature essay and review is here.
INSTALLATION AS SEEN ON NEW VIEWINGS
CURATOR’S ESSAY
The solitary condition of the individual and their reaching out to contact the material world that they share with others underpins the work of Neha Choksi. She does this without resort to metaphor by an unvarnished attention to the physical contact between herself and things and the resonant, sensual atmosphere that occurs between living beings when they connect even if only in passing. Choksi understands that this endeavour to relate is a finely balanced task in which failure to realise its potential is constant and perhaps inevitable. Despite inescapable constraints in her effort by her physical, psychological, and empathetic boundaries, she believes that the directness of experience assists communication.
There is no more direct an experience than touch. Choksi explores the connectivity and its traces that touch offers. It seems the way in which the act of touching marks a point, a moment that acknowledges the immediate past and what lies ahead. As she says, ‘every touch connects and alters and draws breaks between presences and absences and between what has come before and what has yet to come’. There is therefore an attempt within this process to grasp the fleeting nature of time. Creating timely encounters between self and others through her work, Choksi magnifies her experience of access to the quiddity, to the threshold of meaning.
Her relationship as a sentient being with the unconscious or material world is expressed by Choksi in an early performance-based video trilogy. In Minds to Lose (2008-11) Choksi anaesthetised herself and four farmyard animals. Two states of consciousness, the human and the animal, are reduced to the common denominator of the unconscious. In the second video, Leaf Fall (2007-8), Choksi records a single day’s work stripping a tree of all its leaves leaving a sole autumnal sprig at the tip of its highest branch. The final part of this trilogy, Iceboat (2012-13), shows the results of the artist rowing a boat made of ice until it melts and she flounders. In a middle ‘dream sequence’ (her words), close-ups of Choksi’s face as she rows are intercut with footage of her standing on the lakeshore. Throughout the three films Choksi explores the contradictory conditions of disengagement and engagement. They spell out an important aspect of her practice, the experience of absenting and self-erasure.
Choksi’s new video Urgency and Longing (working title) shown in New Viewings is accompanied by a series of finger paintings on glass. The video blends recent video chat recordings of her and her lover’s fingers conjuring touch–to mesmerize each other despite the separation enforced by long-distance and the phone’s glass screen–with footage from a live performance, On the Other Side (2016), featuring a sheet of glass interposed between the artist and a potted ironwood tree. The paintings’ palette, the use of glass, and the paint handling stem from the experiences evidenced in the video. Glass, apparently intangible, forms a barrier and a portal to reality; the artist’s touch is the magic that cracks open a connection to a novel world through the glass to the tree on the other side. Its transparency deceptively seems to yield to pressure. As her fingers and body press against it, it oscillates between portal and mirror. In touching the glass with painted fingers, Choksi embraces the history and primary touch of painting going all the way back to the cave. Her work shares in the primordial quality of the artist’s vision, a quest for the lived perspective, the core truths of perceptual experience.
—David Thorp, curator
PRESS
Neha Choksi’s ‘Urgency and Longing’: impressions of touch during the pandemic
Vidur Sethi, Stirworld
Internet Explorer: Art online #11: The world is upside down
Lara Brörken, Gallerytalk
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