Urgency and Longing (On the other side)
2021
Video, color, sound
10 minutes
CURATOR’S TEXT
Urgency and Longing (On the other side) (2021) was created to be seen onscreen during the pandemic as part of Neha Choksi’s 2021 online solo exhibition, Urgency and Longing, presented by Gallery Barbara Thumm, Berlin.
The curator David Thorp writes, “Choksi’s new video Urgency and Longing (On the other side) (2021) blends recent video chat recordings of her and her lover’s fingers conjuring touch—to mesmerize each other despite the separation enforced by long-distance and the phone’s glass screen—with footage from a live performance, On the other Side (2016), featuring a sheet of glass interposed between the artist and a potted ironwood tree.” To honor the recognition that there is no more direct an experience than touch, the video seamlessly joins ten one-minute chapters for the ten fingers on our hand. Choksi notes, “Every touch connects and alters and draws breaks between presences and absences and between what has come before and what has yet to come.”
Further contextualizing Urgency and Longing within Choksi’s broader practice, Thorp continues “The solitary condition of the individual and their reaching out to contact the material world that they share with others underpins the work of Neha Choksi. She does this without resort to metaphor by an unvarnished attention to the physical contact between herself and things and the resonant, sensual atmosphere that occurs between living beings when they connect even if only in passing…Despite inescapable constraints in her effort by her physical, psychological, and empathetic boundaries, she believes that the directness of experience assists communication.”
VIDEO STILLS
