POROUS EARTH
March 28 - June 15, 2024
A solo exhibition at Project 88, Mumbai



Also exhibited at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art as part of the exhibition The Elemental You, 2024-2025. Porous Earth is in the collection of KNMA.



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ARTIST BIO RELEASED IN LIEU OF A PRESS RELEASE, FOR SOLO AT PROJECT 88

When making this work, Neha Choksi is a child digging, an excavator boring, a horologist counting contingent intervals; is an ancient sea forming the seabed, a chunk of limestone, a core drill bit and a chisel; is this dug hole, that liquid lens, and also the held rope; is injured stone, frank glass, bubbles of air; is light lodged inside rock, a speck of dust lodged inside stone, the glass breathing the speck of dust, the held breath; in the gesture of making a simple sculpture of stone, glass, and air. Choksi lives and works under the Kármán line, in, on, and with the porous earth.



KIRAN NADAR MUSEUM OF ART WALL TEXT

A rock is forming forever. Gravity, wind, water, pressure, decompression, and heat, all play a role. It is as obdurate as it is fragile.

 Seven sculptural installations — stones drilled out of rocks, air bubbles trapped inside glass, crushed stone poured through glass, miming a river, chisels held by stone, one material piercing and connecting another, orbs and lenses that peer through the universe and other depths, a stone hinging its weight at the top of a glass sheet as it slowly sinks downward — constitute the poetic landscape of Porous Earth.

 Porous Earth holds space. At the centre, one finds igneous basalt rocks extracted from the basin systems of Maharashtra. Around it is softer sedimentary limestone and sandstone sourced from central India, land that was once under water. The formation of igneous rock involves decompression deep in the earth’s lithosphere, where the heat melts the rocks and the basalt erupts as magma from beneath the crust. The eruption of lava and its rapid descent, almost like fountains, is similar to forming glass, a material that manifests as solid as well as liquid, and also involves melting and cooling. In Choksi’s sculptures we see glass, formed of sand, enveloping rock dust and air bubbles and in turn being held by rock, provoking an existential conversation of return and recovery with the materials of sculpture, and the discipline of sculpting itself. The artist uncovers points of fissure, suspension, and transformation through an assiduous commitment to process and precision. When juxtaposed, the found stone and the created piece of sculpture in stone, glass, or air begin to speak to the disposition of other stones, rocks, and the earth itself.

Porous Earth holds time. The birth of this planet is entwined with the continual geological churning of the mass of solid rock that constitutes the Earth’s surface and mantle. Every aspect of Porous Earth, Neha Choksi’s most poetic work to date, refers to and revisits that powerful, turbulent, volcanic process of the formation event that occurred in multi-temporal unfoldings and is still ongoing, making the Earth an active planet. Neha Choksi’s Porous Earth presents this ungraspable scale, simultaneity and temporality of the Earth’s vitality as a palpable presence and site of contemplation.

Porous Earth holds us. Choksi expresses it “in the gesture of making a simple sculpture of stone, glass, and air”. The scores accompanying these works are rife with action, “fill a chisel of air with the rock it claws” or “drag the hole into the light” or “tug a cosmos and let it fall”. Visitors become performers as they behold, read, re-read each score while winding their way through the sculptural units. Porous Earth breathes.

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




LINKS/PRESS

Neha Choksi digs deep to answer existential questions
Anindo, Sen, Mint

Why do we dig? New Colaba exhibition traces the connection between humans and Earthly elements
Gautam Mengle, Sunday Mid-day




EXHIBITION HISTORY

Porous Earth, Project 88, 2024
The Elemental You, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2024-2025




RELATED WORKS

Stone Breath Mountain Dust, 2016
Dust to Mountain, 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
and more



Photo credits: Anil Rane and Neha Choksi Studios variously. Porous Earth images courtesy of the artist and Project 88. Porous Earth is in the collection of KNMA.




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INSTALLATION VIEWS
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