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

INSTALLATION VIDEO

VIDEO STILLS

CREDITS here.



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




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