Inside mindscapes that define us

Gill’s works open up the cultural politics of embodying, how people become the landscape where they live, how geography become people, the complex processes of being and becoming one with the things around us—animate, alive, or dead. “With Gill’s Eyes and Storms, Hajra’s Strata 1-24, Choksi’s Porous Earth, the geological timescale touched is huge, it is like the deep time of matter and making of the Earth itself,” she explains. “A fallen tree lets you get up close, touch crevices, run your hands along parts you would otherwise not have been able to get to in such grounded comfort; you can minutely and slowly investigate where branches divide and smooth bark creases and folds….” It is a large, multi-part work of which we have three photograms in the KNMA collection that are presented in this exhibition. Rastogi says, “Sometimes acting as guiding principles, to bear in mind as one walks through and unfolds the works, they become noticeable, overlay, merge and often get lost too. In certain works, they are too strongly present.” For instance, Choksi explains, “In the video project Dust to Mountain, I sequentially kick dust and sand, pebbles and gravel, and eventually a mountain in a dialectic between thinking like a rock vs Dickinson’s line—‘brain is wider than the sky’.