Neelkanth: Poison/Nectar

This image captures an installation by Sheba Chhachhi as exhibited in 'subTerrain: Artworks in the Cityfold,' curated by Geeta Kapur and held at the House of World Cultures, Berlin.

Regarding the exhibition, the curator writes:
'My focus is on art practice in the social, political and psychic 'subterrain' of third world 'global cities.' Here too the contemporary is an inevitable part of the deconstructed history of modernity that valorised the ambiguously masked artist and set up an elaborate masquerade around the theme of what Freud called 'civilisation and its discontents.' This civilisational discourse was furthered by the revolutionary working-class history of the twentieth century and, subsequently, by the history of decolonisation that added new contours to the very idea of civilisation by revealing the vast limitations of a Europe-centred universe. The latter half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of differently situated modern artists all across the third world whose acknowledged presence shaped a hermeneutic retake on the (political) unconscious of the contemporary. It necessitated the relatively privileged interlocutor – the artist – to assume the position of a conspicuously underprivileged subject of an unequal social order, and this led to reasonably located (in regional, national and third world terms) interventions in and through art.'

Participating artists included Navjot Altaf, Sheba Chhachhi, Atul Dodiya, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, Anant Joshi, Ranbir Kaleka, Jitish Kallat, Bhupen Khakhar, Sonia Khurana, Nalini Malani, Raghu Rai, N.N. Rimzon, Sharmila Samant, Vivan Sundaram, and Vasudha Thozhur.

On 8 November 2003, Geeta Kapur delivered a lecture with the same title as the exhibition in the symposium, 'Migrating Images - Reading and Translating Images Transculturally,' organised by the House of World Cultures, Berlin, 7-8 November 2003.

Access level

Online

Language

English

Publication/Creation date

2000 – 2002

Medium

Installation with one LCD projector, one DVD player, 174 aluminum boxes each with light bulb, photographs, four light dimmers, four translites. Installed structure in mandala form, projection on central floor platform

Dimension

Aluminum boxes: 22.8cm x 61cm (height), translites: 40.6cm x 17.7cm x 10.1cm, platform: 76.2cm x 55.8cm, closed room: 865cm x 599cm x 349cm (variable), video loop: 5.5 minutes (silent)

Content type

artwork documentation

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Neelkanth: Poison/Nectar