Simryn Gill, Neha Choksi, and Hajra Waheed: The Elemental You

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art presents the exhibition The Elemental You, the first in a series dedicated to the practices of South Asian diaspora artists, curated by Akansha Rastogi. The exhibition initiates a critical dialogue among the works of three artists: Simryn Gill, Neha Choksi, and Hajra Waheed.

Featuring substantial bodies of work from each artist, the exhibition begins with an exploration of the element “Earth” as a geological, cultural and material experience. For decades, the three artists have engaged with rocks, stones, sand, plants, trees, fruits, light, animals and other beings as subjects and materials for their art, focusing on their multifaceted relationship with the natural world. Most of the works in the exhibition are the artists’ life-long projects or long-term commitments to specific ideas, materials, and methods. This unique layering of their distinct oeuvres is an opportunity to delve deeper into their nuanced politics of being and becoming, embodying and effacing, and wrestling with the abstraction of beinghood, things, non-things.

The planetary, the geological and the personal intersect in the exhibition, to reach another drawn landscape and a distinct emotional horizon. Inspired by the artists’ thoughts, references, and writings, The Elemental You unfolds along three intertwined pathways—i) to think like a mountain, ii) survival as revival, and iii) clearing.

This is a slow exhibition—a slumbering space that transcends human experience, navigating through aeons, eras, days, and decades—marking time as the unit of contemplation. Neha Choksi’s works bring attention to the Earth’s past geological changes and processes that are visible in the present, to the ageing sun and the warming planet. Visitors may find themselves revisiting specific geographies such as Simryn Gill’s industrial port town Port Dickson in Malaysia, which she has been documenting since 1993. 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. The exhibition straddles the boundary between the human and the more-than-human, exploring 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. As they traverse 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.

At the heart of the exhibition is “The Working Space”, which presents two special projects - by Vijai Maia Patchineelam and Ranjana Dave, alongside an Artists’ Roundtable that includes rotating interventions by five artists. The Roundtable converges around themes of grounding, immersion, repetition, field visits, tools, landscape, record-taking, micro-stories, rubbings and the transfer of intimate traces of objects onto surfaces, and many parallel universes. Each artist will occupy the metaphorical Roundtable in succession, sharing the entanglements and transformations occurring in their ever-changing environments, to intersect with the rest of the exhibition.

This exhibition is part of KNMA’s ongoing research and collection-building on South Asian diaspora artists. The Elemental You 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 a one-day film festival, conversations with artists, workshops and coursework on artists’ archives, care and “the pedagogy of unwellness” inspired by Mimi Khuc’s book dear elia. The exhibition and the public programs are curated by Akansha Rastogi, Senior Curator, Exhibitions and Programming at KNMA, with colleagues Avik Debdas, Swati Kumari, Chinmoy Deori and Mahika Banerjee.

Kiran Nadar, Founder and Chairperson of KNMA comments: “We are thrilled to present this timely exhibition that speaks to degrading environmental conditions and the history of the earth. Rooted in the museum collection, it expands outward with seminal works on loan. The exhibition learns from and showcases the inspiring practices of Simryn Gill, Neha Choksi and Hajra Waheed. Together, we hope to open discussions around their work, writings, impulses and visions.”