Neha Choksi

Dust to Mountain
2016
Video installation with fabric
2 minutes 50 seconds, looped



VIDEO STILLS

INSTALLED AT COMMONWEALTH AND COUNCIL, LOS ANGELES, AND FRIEZE LONDON

ARTIST NOTE

The video shows the artist seemingly conjuring a mountain from dust, absurdly and perhaps futilely kicking first dust, then gravel, pebbles, large rocks, huge boulders, all the way up to an entire mountain. Two stories are relevant to her performance: the artist grew up with her Jain family’s prohibition against kicking stones in order to avoid sowing seeds of aggression in our minds, our relationships, and the world; and Samuel Johnson's famous refutation of George Bishop Berkeley's esse est percipi idealism by kicking an unmovable rock and declaring, I refute it thus.

The sheer curtain pictures a landscape supply company's stone yard where the artist’s performance was filmed. This pairing explores via inversions and reversals the reorganization of natural material by cultural forces. A poetic exploration of the philosophical tug-of-war between idealism and materialism, and the interconnectedness of the geological, cosmological and the human, is encapsulated in two catchphrases: loner poet Emily Dickinson’s the brain is wider than the sky, in one fell swoop encompassing the world in one’s imagination, is countered by environmentalist Aldo Leopold’s thinking like a mountain, a phrase famed for extolling slow interconnectedness from his eponymous note. The diaphanous imagery on the curtain places the sky at one’s feet as well as pictures the inverted mountain at the height of the viewer’s head, site of their intellect and vision.

KIRAN NADAR MUSEUM OF ART WALL TEXT:

The video and fabric installation Dust to Mountain presents an upside-down and fragmented landscape on the curtains and the artist's actions performed in the same landscape on the video monitor. Here, the curtain panels are arranged to create three L-shaped spaces intersecting each other. One of them nests a video crafted from Choksi’s live interaction over the course of a day in the gravel bays of a  Southern California landscape supply company and the adjoining hillsides a few hours south of Los Angeles. Perhaps the choice of location alludes to the journey and displacement of the quarried rocks for human needs. In the video, we see a barefoot Choksi persistently kicking the dust, then gravel, then pebbles, sizing up to boulders and eventually a mountain — sweating, hitting, panting, and tiring herself out with these absurd repetitions.

The diaphanous presence of the curtain stands in complete contrast to the weight of the boulders and the obdurate, almost stubborn landscape that she continuously afflicts in equally stubborn, albeit ostensibly futile, refutation. The sheer energy she releases onto the mountain and all its various fragments, and the blues and browns of the curtain seem to render a certain abstraction that speaks to a primordial relationship that humans have with the dust, stones, and mountains around them.

In her text titled  ‘cave (noun)’ she asks in reference to Sisyphus, “Art exceeds, pierces time. But what about the eternally rolling rock? Who thinks about how it feels, what it does, why it behaves as it does? The rock kidnaps time.” Here, Choksi seems to conceptually admit the cave as a place of art material, artistic production, and human habitation where the earliest manifestations of arts are recorded, and where the natural world and the human were more closely entangled. In Dust to Mountain, the artist shifts our focus onto rock itself, as material and actor, as something external to be enacted upon, and as a co-equal actor pushing back. Choksi expresses a deep interest in the indelible tension between the metaphysical and the material, and contends with existential questions about the materiality of beings and things that surround us

— Akansha Rastogi, Senior Curator, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

EXHIBITION HISTORY
Project 88, 2016 (solo exhibition Stone Breath Mountain Dust at Frieze London)
Commonwealth and Council, 2017 (solo exhibition Liberty Matter)
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2024 (group exhibition, The Elemental You)



CREDITS
Video Credits: Cinematographers: Byron Shah, Charlie Balch | Sound Engineer: Mark Gergis | Thank you for Southwest Boulder and Stone, CA
Photo credits: Ruben Diaz and Andy Keate




RELATED WORKS

Stone Breath Mountain Dust, 2016
Liberty Matter, 2017 (featuring Insurrection, 2017 and A Stone’s Throw, 2017)
Ahimsa series, 2020
The Weight of the Cave, 2021
Uncertain Allies, 2021
Strata Bouquet, 2021
Porous Earth, 2024
and more