Himali Singh Soin

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  picks December 15, 2014

  Fiona Banner

  In Fiona Banner’s Chinook, 2014, two sets of helicopter blades mounted on the ceiling just miss each other with every revolution. They seem to quip as lovers might, headlong and heart first, aestheticized amid the surrounding bucolic hills of Yorkshire.

  In Ha-Ha, 2014—titled after the architectural element that forms boundaries between spaces—the gallery’s windows are coated in 95-percent-UV-reduction vinyl with cutout punctuation marks in different fonts forming peepholes, literally shaping how we see the outside. We become voyeurs of a landscape that, by virtue of its concealment, is thrown

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  picks October 09, 2014

  Raqs Media Collective

  A pitch-black clock, The Ecliptic, 2014, holds pride of place in Raqs Media Collective’s current exhibition, “Corrections to the First Draft of History.” Replacing numbers, one half of the clock bears the word TIME, while on the other half, the words FREE, FOLD, FIGURE, FUN, FIX, and FREEZE alternatingly light up. The alliteration provides rhythm and a sense of repetition but also brings to mind the F-word: future. Subjected to a relationship with the noun TIME, the verbs are rendered inactive, becoming adjectives, as if the future will watch the futility of our grasping for a voice or light,

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  picks April 18, 2014

  Dayanita Singh

  The compartments and departments into which we segment the world is a testament to how we read it: in fragments and chapters, with imposed order. Dayanita Singh’s Book Museum, 2014, is a portable collection of books with photographs from her series “File Room,” 2013, and from her mother’s series “Nony Singh: The Archivist,” 2013, affixed onto each of the book’s covers. The former’s images record piles of paper, columns of cabinets, and repositories of registers in damp basements, while the latter documents the melancholy of living between generations.

  The books, which contain full-page black-and-white

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  picks February 17, 2014

  Sudarshan Shetty

  In a tour de force that transcends the label “solo exhibition,” Sudarshan Shetty turns wooden objects into a tactile tale of temporality and ontology that tells of both inanimate matter and its living counterparts. In a space sparsely installed with classical materials such as porcelain, earthenware, and wood, the melancholic tune of a sarangi lilts forth from a video depicting three sequential settings—liminal zones comprising aisles, arches, and atria. Forming triptychs of sorts, each in turn is reproduced thrice, side by side, but with different foregrounds: a woman playing the sarangi, a

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  print September 2013

  “L’exigence de la saudade”

  Halfway up one of Montmartre’s many slopes is a quiet courtyard—flanked by old peeling walls, in one of which there is a gap, revealing a sprouting plant—where a single glass door leads to the Kadist Art Foundation. This sense of an inner life growing out of or into a material structure leaks, like the sunlight, onto the exhibition inside. “L’exigence de la saudade,” indicating a demand for nostalgia, was the culmination of a three-month residency by Mumbai’s Clark House Initiative, a curatorial collaboration between Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma. The diverse work by twenty artists on

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  interviews May 06, 2013

  Linda Mary Montano

  Linda Mary Montano is perhaps best known for her endurance-based performances. She sang for seven hours in a scissor lift; wore monochromatic garments for fourteen years; was blindfolded for a week; and spent a year bound by a length of rope to the artist Tehching Hsieh during his ART/LIFE: ONE YEAR PERFORMANCE, 1983–84. Montano’s art, which borrows from her life, has been dedicated to living with patience and empathy. Her current retrospective of videos, installations, drawings, and performances, titled “Linda Mary Montano: Always Creative,” is on view at SITE Santa Fe until May 19, 2013.

  IT

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  picks February 08, 2013

  Bharti Kher

  In Bharti Kher’s latest exhibition, everyday objects are given temperament. A tree trunk seems apathetic as it interrupts a door; a staircase attempts, cholerically, to reach beyond the gallery’s ceiling; and a series of cement planks balance on a chair, yearning, in helpless turmoil, to form a triangle. It is no coincidence that these objects are also portals, devices that might lead their own bodies from one state into another. Yet the impotence of their journeys, due to the illusory nature of their destinations, renders these objects tragically comic. Kher’s solo show comprises three such

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  picks November 29, 2012

  Aditya Pande

  In each of the fifteen mixed-media on paper works of Aditya Pande’s solo exhibition “Half-Life” a circle lies contiguous to a semicircle. Composed digitally, these two elemental shapes are mathematically perfect, such that their radii are constant, even as the open semicircle symbolically implies an incomplete half. Literally, the shapes mimic the imperative word DO, while conjecturally, in their bright, playful colors, they appear anthropomorphized, as if they may be characters from an episode of South Park. But what are they satirizing? The abstract confusion of media within each of these

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  picks October 01, 2012

  Robert Wilson and Philip Glass

  The first-ever exhibition of Philip Glass’s autograph score for his great five-hour 1976 opera, Einstein on the Beach, along with Robert Wilson’s thirteen graphite-drawn storyboards (which were first shown at Paula Cooper Gallery in 1976), inspires ontological ruminations through its systematic study of the circle (space) and the line (the axes of time). The room is stark and symmetrical in composition. In the center, a wooden bench is positioned in front of a wall upon which seven excerpts of the opera, totaling twenty minutes, are looped. Wilson’s sketches and Glass’s sheet music are hung on

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  picks May 13, 2012

  Rebecca Horn

  Rebecca Horn’s heartfelt impressions from Uzbekistan are collected in Notebook Samarkand, 2001, a book of poems and untitled photographs, currently on view as part of her first solo exhibition in India. The diary-size hardback sits on a block, setting up the mood for the fourteen selected photographs that hang on the walls. Each image seems, as the artist states in her collection of poetry, “dipped into the liquid gold of the morning.” In one, an old woman smiles toothlessly. In another, a young boy dressed for prayer peers shyly out at the viewer, and in yet another, a middle-aged man, wearing

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  picks April 13, 2012

  Rajorshi Ghosh

  Upon entry, there is an overwhelming sense of space: Rajorshi Ghosh’s four architectural installations in this show are spare, inviting viewers to project their imaginations, at high tide, onto the rigid mathematics of a room. “Rooms by the Sea” reconstructs the essential workings of the psyche through a seascape. The source of this idea is in a wall text that quotes Salman Rushdie’s 1991 speech at Columbia University, in the wake of the fatwa issued against him: “I’ve lived in that messy ocean all my life. I’ve fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea . . . is the sea by which I was born

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  picks March 11, 2012

  Natasha de Betak

  “Impulse,” 2011, Natasha de Betak’s latest series of photographs, elicits a surreal string of adjectives: foggy, luminous, somnambulant, amoebic, and sublime, to pinpoint a few. Thirty-six digital prints, smudged and out of focus, are hung in seemingly arbitrary clusters, just as the subjects range from a vacant bed in a psychiatric ward to a droplet of water suspended midair to a naked man and a distant, unnamed landscape. De Betak utilizes a macro lens, zooming in, defying scale; here a molecule looks like a moon. The most intriguing works on view are the two that confront time directly: a