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

KNMA INSTALLATION VIDEO — to come

VIDEO STILLS

FILM CREDITS here.



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 — to come



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