The latest exhibition at HH Art Spaces in Goa demonstrates the collective’s sustained efforts over the past few years to expand beyond a previous focus on performance. Founded by artists Nikhil Chopra, Madhavi Gore and Romain Loustau in 2014, it operated out of a multipurpose gallery and living space in Arpora before shifting to Aldona. Chopra and HH Art Spaces are curators of the Kochi Biennale 2025. Their residency programme, active since the organisation’s inception, initially focused on performers and site-specific installation artists, who have historically held a fringe position on the Indian art market. In making space for alternative practices outside of institutional and financial dependency, HH has become known for fostering a sense of community between artists across borders and disciplines. The preview of The Desert, a solo exhibition by CCXX curated by the HH team, captured this balance remarkably well: the patio is transformed into a dance floor, courtesy of Squidworks (Varoon Nair) and the rest of the party extends into the bar and the parking area, but the central gallery space is hushed and empty as a shrine.

Consisting of sculptures cast in concrete and plaster, these works were developed by CCXX — also known as Eknath — during a month-long residency at HH and show continuity with his practice over the past year, most notably a series of paper reliefs that resemble the patterns of cracked glass. The act of cracking or breaking is presented not as evidence of forced movement through a barrier, or conversely, the fragility of a boundary, but as an opportunity for recomposing an already fragmented self. The works in The Desert take this in a new direction, as moulds of books and cardboard boxes that were strategically ripped, folded or dismantled.

The works find the spots of friction between the original and its copy, the definite and the abstract, the void and the shelter. This friction creates space for comprehension, tethering the dissolving, blurring forms to a recognisable materiality. While these are valuable sites of exploration, the curatorial note draws parallels between binaries which were, for me, difficult to appreciate: positive and negative space, the white plaster and the dark grey concrete, the overabundance of information and the lure of the invisible. The note’s question of excess and mass production is also absent in the works, which feature blemishes and other incidental imperfections, rather than offering commentary on reproducibility by taking on a clean, machine-made appearance.

Among the sculptures in the main gallery, the impression is that the books have been methodically dug into. With step-like edges and the deepest levels near the centre, these works evoke quarries, where the removed material is the goal and archaeological sites, where the displaced earth is simply in the way. In some cases, the imprints of grooves or tape on the cardboard resolve themselves into urban maps, blueprints of industrial units and cross-sections of machine parts. This can be read as a kind of self-referential commentary, asking whether it is the original or the imagery suggested by the mould that is the ‘real’ final result. I find this instinctive need for familiar shapes far more interesting. Abstraction is at its most revelatory when it clears space for us to ask ourselves why we need to see patterns in illegible marks, why we rush to fill silences.

Although most are mounted on the wall, CCXX’s sculptures seem to offer views of a miniature world glimpsed as though from above. Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space (1958), argues that the miniaturised world is a space of safety, dispelling all variables by making itself visible in its entirety. As forms that dwell on absences and traces, CCXX’s sculptures remind us that abstraction can still summon an unnerving fear of the void. One is startled by occasional motifs embossed on the original paper, like a leafing tree, a logo, or a series of circles. Without their initial context, they appear adrift in the abstract forms, like lost survivors of the cutting and casting process. Among other, smaller details that the eye seeks out are the physical blemishes from the casting process and the imprints of the original object, which seem to meet somewhere in the middle. A book’s ripped pages seem to mirror the chipped edges of the plaster and concrete; the shades of grey on the concrete surface were likely imparted by the warping and cracking of the cardboard as the mould was being taken; and the accidental air pockets in the plaster blend with the folds and cracks of the paper.

Several works feature elements that resemble minerals in their ‘wild’ state embedded into the form. These range from a barely noticeable glass chip in the corner of a small, pocketbook-sized cast to entire crystal clusters sunk into concrete cubes. They are certainly more technically challenging than the casts of books and cardboard sheets, as these cubes require a carefully planned pour in order to retain the geometrical form while accommodating the irregular crystals. The concrete surface is finished in a way that is strongly reminiscent of terrazzo flooring, where chips of aggregate (gravel or larger stone pieces) are strategically arranged into a pattern before the white concrete is poured into the mould.

While the placement of the geodes next to the bar is only puzzling, the untitled installation in the basement space seems more visibly incongruous with the rest of the exhibition. A book of transparent OHP pages lies open on a lectern, lit as though from within. The glowing, blank pages emphasise the ghostly themes suggested in the curatorial note and may have been better suited to a show that contained more such conceptual experiments. It contrasts too strongly with the relief sculptures above, which are intensely material in their texture and in the preservation of errors that arose in the casting process. Ironically, this basement installation is the only work which resonates with the exhibition’s title; here, the desert is rediscovered as an absence, a blank book which may have once held the records of a religion, a life, or a fever dream.

The Desert is strongest when it resists symbolic closure, allowing material and process to speak for themselves in subtle yet persistent ways. Though some curatorial connections feel tenuous or underdeveloped, the show succeeds in staging a shift: not only in HH’s evolving identity as a space, but also in the viewer’s encounter with abstraction as something not detached or remote, but intimate, weathered and insistently real.

‘The Desert’ will be on view from May 16 - June 16, 2025, at HH Art Spaces, Goa.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.