Neha Choksi

Save the translation for later
2016
Solo exhibition
Project 88



Works include woodcuts, a live performance, and a video.



INSTALLATION

On the other side
2016
Live work; tree, glass, artist

For a video work including footage and ideas from this live work, see Urgency and Longing.

In Leaf (Primary Time)
2015
Live performance, trees, video
Video TRT 22’51”

For more information on the video, please go to In Leaf (Primary Time).

Touching Integrity (Larch) 1-9
2016
Woodcut on Kozo paper
Each approximately 90 X 47 inches unframed
each unique
Photo: Anil Rane and Neha Choksi

Repeat Integrity (Oak)
2016
Series of 7 woodcuts
47 x 35 each unframed
unique
Photo: Anil Rane

SAVE THE TRANSLATION FOR LATER

I am spent.

I will not “examine, uncover, unmask, expose, reveal, reflect, illustrate, comment.”

There is me and there is a whole world of yous.

We are all solitary.

Where do we touch? When do we battle? The littlest things matter. The senses are aquiver, the depths travel to the surface and the surface digs into the depths.

We are on the threshold of meaning. Of saying hullo but not knowing how to. I tilt with awkwardness, stilted interaction; the awkwardnesses interact, intentions clarify.

We are all resonant, all electromagnetic portals despite mass and gravity.

My life stretches and collapses, a surfeit of drive with starts and stops, irrationally measured and spaced with hesitations and expansions. Despite my urgency to abstract it, fragment it, reduce it, pulverize it, shape it, suck it, condense it, strain it, magnify it to ill-definable halos, traces, emanations, the story goes and goes.

I don’t want metaphors. I want directness of experience. I do, and you experience it.

I may be solitary but not self-determined. You are always beside me. We are related in our belief in visibility and parity.

Even my fingers on a single hand are not equal. Even if parted between the ring and the middle finger, the split is unbalanced by the thumb, the outlier, the opposable one.

Do you know the Vulcan Salute? Dif-tor heh smusma, if you do.

As one metaphysicist said in a much different context: “When communicating with beings in other dimensions it is sometimes a good idea to save the translation for later.”

—Neha Choksi

RELATED WORKS AND EXHIBITIONS

Porous Earth, 2024
Urgency and Longing, 2021
Into (on the other side), 2016
In Leaf (Primary Time), 2015