Neha Choksi: Minds To Lose

About

Beginning from single propositions – rowing a boat made of ice out into a lake, or stripping all the leaves from a tree to isolate one sprig – Choksi’s works make tragicomic interventions in the life of plants, animals; even her own. In the process, these absurd actions unfold outwards into reflections on erasure and absence.

This exhibition presents a series of recent video works, Trilogy on Absenting, together with a new performance devised for Hayward Gallery Project Space. Centring on the artist’s application of paint to living trees over the course of a single day, this performance continues her work’s ongoing search for and acceptance of absence and emptiness.

'There is often an element of the absurd and the traumatic in my projects’ operations and this work is no exception. My works all approach absence through an excess of gesture and of presence.' (Neha Choksi)

Born in 1973, Neha Choksi lives and works in Los Angeles and Mumbai. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including presentations at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014; the ninth Shanghai Biennale; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art; Torrance Art Museum,California; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; and the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale.

Neha Choksi: Minds to Lose is curated by Eimear Martin, Hayward Gallery Assistant Curator