Sunset Kino: Moving image works by Neha Choksi

Moving image works by Neha Choksi (USA)
14.08.2024 21:00
Introduction by Mirela Baciak, Director of Salzburger Kunstverein. Followed by a Q&A with Neha Choksi and Mirela Baciak.

Charge, 2017-2021,1:37 min
This short film brings together the intimate, the natural, and those things touched by human civilization.

The Drop (A Leaf), 2008, 1:43 min
The film imagines the falling of the last leaf left unplucked as recorded in Leaf Fall from A Trilogy on Absenting.

A Trilogy on Absenting: Leaf Fall, Minds to Lose, Iceboat, 2007-2013, 40 min
This trilogy of interrelated films engage with absenting, withdrawals, and disengagements. In Iceboat (2012-2013, 13:17 min) the artist rows a boat of ice until it melts and releases them into the waters. Using a single screen with multiple ever-changing divisions, Minds to Lose (2008-2011 11:54 min) creates a forced familial commonality between the artist as human and four farm animals as they submit to the loss of consciousness and become unaware of even one’s mortality. Leaf Fall (2007-2008, 14:15 min) shows the denuding of a tree over the course of a single day, leaving behind an autumnal sprig, made special through the day’s relentless process of subtraction.

Everything sunbright (i) in the womb (ii) lives (iii) ever rehearsing the end *indirectly, 2018, 26:12 min
The multichannel video installation Everything sunbright is the culmination of a series of works examining our relationship to the sun, divided into birth, life struggle, and death. The videos include footage from earlier live works, such as The Sun’s Rehearsal, for which she created a billboard-size free-standing wall pasted over with eight layers of wallpaper depicting both real and imagined sunsets and with a large cutout void where the sun would have been. While the work was on view, dancer Alice Cummins slowly tore at the layers to suggest the loss and decay that time enacts, including the possibility of a “final fatal sunset,” as the artist describes it. Choksi augments footage from these earlier projects with imagery of a solar observatory in India; the dry landscapes of the Los Angeles basin; acts of making in her studio; and a project shot in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In Dhaka, the artist worked with eleven children, ranging in age from seven to twelve, who were paired with adult professionals—including a climate scientist, a folk singer, and a psychiatrist—and asked to make drawings of the sun. One channel includes the daily notations of the sun’s activity made by solar scientists in India during the forty weeks the artist was in her mother’s womb. Connecting the daily solar cycles with the temporality of human life, the installation strikes a poetic tone that balances the optimism we feel with the sun’s arrival each day and the haunting sense of transience that accompanies the erasure and darkness we associate with the setting sun and, indeed, our own mortality. (Text by Anne Ellegood.)

Dust to Mountain, 2016, 3 min
The video (part of an installation work) shows the artist seemingly conjuring a mountain from dust, absurdly and perhaps futilely kicking first dust, then gravel, pebbles, large rocks, huge boulders, all the way up to an entire mountain. Two stories are relevant to her performance: the artist grew up with her Jain family’s prohibition against kicking stones in order to avoid sowing seeds of aggression in our minds, our relationships, and the world; and Samuel Johnson's famous refutation of George Bishop Berkeley's esse est percipi idealism by kicking an unmovable rock and declaring, I refute it thus.

In collaboration with Salzburg International Summer Academy.

In work across and beyond performance, moving image, and sculpture, Neha Choksi probes lived experiences that negotiate relationships in unconventional settings. Harnessing stone to plant, animal to friends, publics to philosophy, Choksi’s materially bound art engages the terms of our existence in ways personal and planetary. Choksi’s work has been widely exhibited, screened, or performed in the United States, Asia, Australia, UK, and Europe. Choksi lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Bombay, India. www.nehachoksi.com