The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi is currently presenting The Elemental You, a group exhibition featuring three South Asian diasporic practices at its Saket space. The show brings together works by Singapore-born artist Simryn Gill, who is based between Sydney and Port Dickson in Malaysia; Hajra Waheed, who was born in Canada and grew up in Saudi Arabia; and Neha Choksi, who was born in New Jersey and lives and works between Los Angeles and Mumbai, India. The show is on view from October 15, 2024 - January 9, 2025, and is curated by Akansha Rastogi, senior curator - exhibitions and programming at KNMA, along with Avik Debdas; Swati Kumari, associate curator - exhibition and research; Chinmoy Deori, curatorial associate - research and programs and Mahika Banerjee, who is associate - writing and publication, curatorial. Rastogi sat down with STIR to discuss the show in greater depth.

The exhibition centres on works built from the artists’ longstanding creative preoccupations. Choksi’s art is rooted in an exploration of earth, time and transience. Gill has been documenting the Malaysian town of Port Dickson since 1993 and Waheed focuses on the lasting legacies of colonialism and state violence.

It is by far the largest institutional presentation of all three artists in South Asia. – Akansha Rastogi, senior curator, exhibitions and programming at KNMA

Choksi’s Dust to Mountain (2016) features the artist in the absurd act of kicking a mountain into existence, first by kicking at dust, then at larger and larger stones. The piece is partly informed by Choksi’s Jain background, as Jainism forbids even the most minor gestures of aggression such as rock kicking. The Indian religion shuns all violence and sees such gestures as the seeds for more harmful acts. Dust to Mountain is also influenced by the English writer Samuel Johnson’s refutation of Irish philosopher George Bishop Berkeley’s esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) principle. Berkeley believed that reality is dependent on one’s perception of the world around them. Johnson, exasperated by his certainty that Berkeley was wrong, but unable to convincingly refute him, kicked a stone as he exclaimed, “I refute it thus!”

Choksi approaches rocks and stones as much more than the detritus we come across in our daily lives. As Rastogi tells STIR, “She treats the found, treated, cored into rocks as living and breathing bodies. Of course different from the human body, but as bodies, as matter - [they] occupy space, have volume and interact chemically with everything around them and are constantly changing their internal composition too.” Like Choksi, Waheed also finds artistic inspiration in natural phenomena. She presents several works at KNMA, including a series of oil paintings of the sky above Kashmir, the northernmost region of the Indian subcontinent that is locked in a three-way territorial dispute among the governments of India, Pakistan, and members of the Kashmiri populace who want national sovereignty. Waheed brings our attention to the constancy of the sky, regardless of the turmoil that unfolds beneath it. It is a simple yet profound statement that speaks to a sense of resilience, akin to the old adage “the sun will rise again”.

Gill’s longstanding documentation of Port Dickson has yielded the photo collage series A Small Town at the Turn of the Century (1999-2000). These photographs present a surreal vision of her personal history with the town, where her subjects’ faces have been hidden by tropical fruits such as rambutans, durians, bananas and more. Gill acknowledges the fallibility of human memory. So—as one imagines she would argue—why bother at all with precision when creating memory-keeping artefacts like photographs? Gill’s photographic collages hint at the sensory experience of each situation she captures, evoking how they tasted or felt.

The Elemental You is an important exhibition for both the artists and KNMA. Rastogi tells STIR, “It is by far the largest institutional presentation of all three artists in South Asia.” The show takes up most of KNMA’s space, filling the museum with artworks. The Elemental You’s presentation could feel a bit cramped and disorienting for viewers; however, Ranjana Dave, STIR’s own managing editor (arts), has written a poetic movement score that is spread across the walls of the gallery and guides audiences through the show. The score encourages us to experience The Elemental You with all our senses. Dave—an avid hiker—is also presenting a project in KNMA's Working Space. Her art installation 5-4-3-2-1 (2024) invites audience members to dwell on their relationship to their environment, playing different sounds that she collected while traversing the Himalayas and the Aravalis.

The gallery also contains an artists’ roundtable, which engages a shifting body of practices that activate the space. Rastogi reflects on the roundtable, telling STIR, “It has five artists and duos coming in succession and it has been an exhilarating journey opening up the duration of the art exhibition in such generative ways. Each visit by audiences is different because one or the other part has moved or changed. The programming of the exhibition was also planned simultaneously, so it is extensive and a crucial part of the exhibition-making itself.”

Going beyond The Elemental You, Rastogi has her hands full with various curatorial commitments. The curator tells STIR, “I’m working on the fifth exhibition under the series Young Artists of Our Times that I conceptualised in 2019 as part of KNMA’s exhibition programme. Details of the exhibition will be announced in early January. Four previous exhibitions under the series have been huge successes and brought in art-makers from different disciplines to the museum.” She is also involved with the planning of inaugural exhibitions for KNMA’s new museum building, which will open its doors in Delhi in 2027.

‘The Elemental You’ is on view from October 15, 2024 - January 9, 2025, at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.