Marie DuPasquier presents ‘Pinch your Thumb and Three Fingers’
The project is supported by
Mumbai Art Room
Pro Helvetia – Swiss Art Council
RRO – Bring Health To Your Table
Künstlerhaus Stadttöpferei Neumünster.
An exhibition of works by
Neha Kudchadkar
Curated by Marie DuPasquier
Opening, Wed 28 March 2018, 6pm
at Mumbai Art Room
Pipewala Building, Fourth Pasta Lane, Colaba, Mumbai 400 005
Exhibition dates: March 28 – June 15, 2018
Opening night: Wednesday, March 28, 2018:
7:00 pm: talk and open discussion, in presence of the artist and the curator
Display is glad to present the exhibition Pinch your Thumb and Three Fingers, by the Bombay based artist Neha Kudchadkar, that features “Hand Job”, conceived during her stay at the Künstlerhaus Stadttöpferei Neumünster. The exhibition is a cooperation with Mumbai Art Room and Pro Helvetia – Swiss Art Council, in the frame of the curatorial lab and residency. In that context, both the artist Neha Kudchadkar and the curator Marie DuPasquier, as well as Display and Mumbai Art Room engaged a collaboration considered to be the beginning of a longer conversation.
Pinch your thumb and three fingers
Pinch your thumb and three fingers, tip, scroll, double tap, smart zoom in and out, rotate, swipe, open, drag, spread. The multi-touch manual will teach you effectively how to develop new fingertip abilities and adopt gestures or communication skills to navigate the haptic system of our black screen devices. How formed or deformed are the digits and palms of our hands? Can human beings adapt to being in touch without touching?
Neha Kudchadkar, through her work “Hand Job”, grasps the tactile-kinesthetic relationship between bodies and objects, technological devices, that populate our daily life and intimate spheres. In her practice, she works predominantly with clay and creates objects, extensions of her body, ready to be used and added to a potential augmented body. Ceramic has long accompanied humankind in the history of technology, as from antique craft and means of construction to being a component of industrial engineering, it joined the most sophisticated equipment that compose our mobile devices. Even as the artist acknowledges this, her corporeal engagement with the material to shape the ceramic tools allows her to imprint her digits and trace her own experience.
Bound but not restricted to this particular medium, with the sensitive materiality and movement that her work implies, she opens her practice up to other roles and media such as photography, performance or video. She moves through the numerous boundaries of geographical and political spaces, through those of gender and culture, to lay across them, to connect and open a dialogue within disciplines on materiality and the body. Pinch your Thumb and Three Fingers is a sensitive and intimate contact zone in which Neha Kudchadkar fleshes out the portrait of our human condition; an exhibition on connectivity.
Text by curator Marie DuPasquier
bonjour@display-berlin.com
www.display-berlin.com
About the artist
Neha Kudchadkar is a visual and performing artist currently based in Mumbai. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, London, and the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.U. Baroda. She is a recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship and the Junior Fellowship, Government of India. She has chosen to negotiate various roles – dancer, ceramicist, researcher, teacher, choreographer, administrator, collaborator – that inform one another and broaden her approach as an artist and maker. Neha places herself in her social, political, material, cultural, and physical environment through her work – sometimes playful, sometimes somber. She often uses her body as the subject and object of her work and as a tool for the making of it. www.nehakudchadkar.com
About the curator
Marie DuPasquier is a Swiss independent curator and museologist, active between Zürich and Berlin. She graduated in History of Art and Museology at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. For several years, she has been associate curator and administrator at Maison d’Ailleurs, Museum for science-fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys and was president of the Biel/Bienne Photography Festival in Switzerland. Although her work recalls photography, contemporary art, science-fiction, museum- and curatorial studies, it also reflects her curiosity for a transmedia and transdisciplinary approach. She is director of Display, a space for art and curatorial experimental practices in Berlin. She focuses on experimenting curation, exhibition design and devices and is engaged in questioning image systems, investigating the positions, movements and relationships of the different actors and bodies in the space and considering the digital universes. She is currently initiating the curatorial research Contemporary Bodies, for 2018-2019, supported by Pro Helvetia – Swiss art Council which will be the base of a series of exhibition in Display, Berlin Germany, Switzerland, India and Belgium in 2018-2019. www.display-berlin.com
For more details on the project click here (PDF)
Feedback post collaboration
“To collaborate with the artist Neha Kudchadkar on this exhibition « Pinch your Thumb and Three Fingers » was great. We had to deal with such a delicate and intimate matter, considering both material and thematic. I really like to think this exhibition as a sensitive contact zone for many aspects and in that sense it’s a luxury to be able to do such shows. The whole Mumbai Art Room team was absolutely fantastic as I felt supported every minute, for the whole duration of my stay in Mumbai and the exhibition process. It would have just not been possible to achieve without them. I acknowledge it is so important to have this professional base in Mumbai. The beautiful meetings and exchanges I had in Mumbai and during the preparation of the show, predict more collaborations to come, that’s the best feeling I can take back with me.”
Marie DuPasquier
Curator / Museologist
Switzerland
