Neha Choksi

Everything sunbright
(i) in the womb
(ii) lives
(iii) ever rehearsing the end
*indirectly
2018
Four channel video installation with i, ii, iii as projections, * on monitor
26 minutes 12 seconds, synched loop

 

INSTALLATION

HAMMER MUSEUM INSTALLATION VIDEO

VIDEO STILLS

FILM CREDITS here.



KNMA INSTALLATION PHOTO / VIDEO — to come



HAMMER MUSEUM WALL TEXT

Through considerations of consciousness, memory, and mortality, Neha Choksi centers her practice on the materialization of time, foregrounding temporality and transformation over the desire for permanence. Choksi’s work—in which performance-based video is primary, but which also includes photography, sculptures, and works on paper—explores the fragility of life, how we process loss, and the productive possibilities in confronting, head-on, manifestations of absence.

For Made in L.A. 2018, Choksi has created the multichannel video installation Everything sunbright, which is the culmination of a series of works examining our relationship to the sun, divided into birth, life struggle, and death. The videos include footage from earlier works, such as The Sun’s Rehearsal, for which she created a billboard-size free-standing wall pasted over with eight layers of wallpaper depicting both real and imagined sunsets and with a large cutout void where the sun would have been. While the work was on view, dancer Alice Cummins slowly tore at the layers to suggest the loss and decay that time enacts, including the possibility of a “final fatal sunset,” as the artist describes it. 

Choksi augments footage from these earlier projects with imagery of a solar observatory in India; the dry landscapes of the Los Angeles basin; acts of making in her studio; and a project recently shot in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In Dhaka, the artist worked with eleven children, ranging in age from seven to twelve, who were paired with adult professionals—including a climate scientist, a folk singer, and a psychiatrist—and asked to make drawings of the sun. One channel includes the daily notations of the sun’s activity made by solar scientists in India during the forty weeks the artist was in her mother’s womb. Connecting the daily solar cycles with the temporality of human life, the installation strikes a poetic tone that balances the optimism we feel with the sun’s arrival each day and the haunting sense of transience that accompanies the erasure and darkness we associate with the setting sun and, indeed, our own mortality.

— Anne Ellegood, Senior Curator, Hammer Museum




KIRAN NADAR MUSEUM OF ART WALL TEXT

“I have a repeating dream of me as a child coming home from school and sitting down to draw. And I draw suns. I use every crayon in the box. I draw every type of sun. One after the other, tirelessly. A rainbow sun, a hollow sun, a scared sun, a new sun, a neat sun, a dirty sun, a magic sun, a spinning sun, a poem sun, a danger sun, a boss sun, an open sun, a tired sun, a breathing sun, a clapping sun, a mirror sun, a funny sun, a sour sun…”

In 2016, Neha Choksi began a short story published in The Brooklyn Rail with these words. A year later, she invited ten Bangladeshi children to draw suns, as part of Dhaka Art Summit’s new commission. Each child was paired to converse with a professional from fields such as archaeology, climate science, psychiatry, folk singing, etc., — after each child had spent considerable time thinking about and drawing their own suns — reflecting together on the sun they see every day and associate emotions and ideas with. The child obsessed with drawing suns now splinters into many, as do the suns that power and centre these conversations. This features in one of the central channels of her video installation.

Another channel in the video installation features Choksi’s collaboration with dance artist Alice Cummins for the live work In Memory of the Last Sunset accompanying The Sun’s Rehearsal (2016), her contribution to the Sydney Biennale. Imagining “an encounter with a future loss, one which the sun stages daily, as if making ready for the very last time it will ever set”, an ageing dancer peels off billboard size sunsets, one fragment at a time, leaving traces in the process; marking what is, what was, and the would be as the body is simultaneously being reconstituted as a site of narration itself. Through an ageing sun and the ageing body, the artist proposes the idea of “a final fatal sunset”.  This channel starts with a reference to another video work The Weather Inside Me (Bombay Sunset) (2007-10) which documents a single sunset recorded in Mumbai from the site of a crematorium her family uses. Showing a still photograph from this sunset video being burnt in the artist’s hand, this four-channel installation navigates the personal and charts the artist’s life and work intriguingly.

Reflecting and weaving together the artist’s almost decade-long journey, Everything Sunbright is a complex work. The sun, the sunsets, the cosmos and the cosmic initiate meteorological, astronomical, planetary as well as mundane, historical, and personal processes for Choksi. The source of life and energy on earth, the sun connects with the cycle of life and death, darkness and light, illuminating our memory of things. The work holds a sombre sense of an ending, an absence not only of oneself but of the planet, the sun, and all its meanings.

In this way and many, this four-channel video installation delves into human kind’s contested relationship with the sun, framing it within the context of birth, life, struggle, and death. It presents notations of solar activity during the 40-week period of the artist’s gestation in her mother's womb together with footage of wet and dry landscapes, children’s drawings, and the life of a warming planet. We see different iterations of the sun and its representations that connect us to the artist’s past, the budding promise of a collective future, and the impending thought of a final sunset.

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




LINKS/PRESS

Made in LA
Leah Ollman, Art in America

A Multiplicity of Perspectives: 'Made in L.A. 2018' Succeeds by Refusing to Define a Los Angeles Aesthetic
Kavior Moon, Artnews

'Made in L.A. 2018': Why the Hammer biennial is the right show for disturbing times
Christopher Knight, LA Times

‘Made in L.A. 2018’: Widely Inclusive and Brimming with Community Spirit, But Is It Too Earnest?
Travis Diehl, Frieze

Made in L.A. 2018
Jonathan Griffin, Art Agenda

Ambitious, Diverse and Topical: “Made in L.A. 2018” Is the Biennial We Need Right Now
Jordan Riefe, LA Weekly

How 5 Artists in the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA Biennial Are Using Their Work to Imagine a Better Future
Janelle Zara, Artnet

Made in L.A. Exhibit at the Hammer Museum Part Two
Juliette Edwards and Gayle Anderson, KTLA 5

Precarious Healing: On Made in L.A. 2018
Jennifer Remenchik, Carla

Loose Aesthetics and Agreeable Politicking: On Made in L.A. 2018
Aaron Horst, Carla

Art in the Age of Trump
Constance Mallinson, Times Quotidian

Carmen Argote Explores ‘Artistic Gestures’ in Artists on Artists Talk
Omar Rashad, High School, LA Times

Made in L.A. 2018
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles




SELECTED PRESS EXCERPTS

“In Neha Choksi’s four-channel video installation Everything sunbright (2018), observations on the source of life on our planet interweave with a dancer’s elegiac tribute to her mother. From one projection to another, the tone shifts from scientific to sacred, and scale oscillates from the astronomical to the familial. A meditation on origins and inevitable loss, the piece feels searingly intimate throughout.”
—Leah Ollman, Art in America

“Littered riverbanks and smog-filled cityscapes appeared in Neha Choksi’s multichannel video Everything sunbright, a poignant rumination on mortality and the human life cycle, as well as the sun’s eventual expiration.”
—Kavior Moon, Artnews

“Among the strongest are…Neha Choksi’s achingly poetic, four-channel lamentation for the ongoing, perhaps irreversible degradation of Mother Earth (and a yearning to escape it).”
—Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times

“Neha Choksi’s Everything sunbright i) in the womb ii) lives iii) ever rehearsing the end * indirectly (2018), a four-channel loop, juxtaposes shots of a dancer ripping up a stage flat of a sunset, a charcoal drawing of a black-hole sun, and various orbs and emanations spinning, rhythmically but directionless, around the form of the sun’s disc. Formalism here isn’t a conclusion at all, but a kind of pivot, from which to revisit the surrounding chaos.”
—Travis Diehl, Frieze

“Neha Choksi’s multi-part video installation Everything sunbright (2018), about nothing less than humanity’s conflicted relationship with the sun, is a feast for the eyes and the mind.”
—Jonathan Griffin, Art Agenda

EXHIBITION HISTORY

Hammer Museum in 2018
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2024

RELATED WORKS

The Sun’s Rehearsal / In Memory of the Last Sunset, 2016
Integrity woodcuts, 2016
Last words first cry, 2013
The Weather Inside Me (Bombay sunset), 2007-2010
That time (sun sets for Sam), 2007