Neha Choksi

Name: Stone as Actor, Stone as Stage
Start: 2024-08-04T00:00:00+02:00
End: 2024-08-24T23:59:59+02:00
Location: Untersberg quarry

Stone as Actor, Stone as Stage

4–24 August 2024

Untersberg quarry

Stone Breathe Mountain Dust, installation view, photo: Andy Keate.

[Slider above] Strata Bouquet, photo: Ruben Diaz.

Application

Medium
Stone

Location
Untersberg Quarry

Teaching Language
English

What to bring
Basic stone working tools and reasonable quantities of stone are provided. You will need safety equipment (safety eyewear, work gloves, earmuffs, dust masks, sturdy work shoes), weatherproof clothes, sunscreen, and a swimsuit. Please bring some drawing materials and any reference printouts or notes. There is no printer on site. Bring any tools or special materials you may want to use in dialog with stone, for instance, fabric, props, a musical instrument, or pertinent reading or media materials to share.

Requirements
No experience with stone required. A willingness to work outdoors and an openness to conversations with each other, the stone, and the environment.

Maximum number of participants
12

Teaching assistant
Leon Hölzl

Participation Fee
890 Euro (reduced 635 Euro)

Rock is not merely material or mineral; you are not just a maker exerting control over the rock. Rock and humans are all loci for slow and fast, discernible or evanescent processes, and way stations for exchanges, associations, and learnings. Let our work reflect on the stone as both an actor with its own geological and cultural experiences and a stage on which we (and others) enact, project, and enrich ourselves. This class acknowledges our kinship and our evident otherness from stone. In our discussions and encounters with stone, our respective material strengths and vulnerabilities will drive the range of our interconnectedness and relationships to stone. Our personal and planetary fates are tied. What can we learn from activating the stage of the quarry and enacting the agency of stone?

Together, we will converse with the unique setting of the quarry and the ancient material of Untersberger marble. You will have a chance to discuss and develop your ideas individually and in a supportive cohort throughout the three-week session. Each of us will generate ideas at the quarry to make work with and about stone. We will learn by researching and mapping the senses of stone—for instance, by knocking stones together, reading poetry to the stones, echoing our dancing steps in the quarry—and by sharing with each other sounds, textures, and embodied live gestures that link our body’s fate with that of the earth. Choksi and Holzl will support your conceptual and technical questions around stone sculpture. In addition, you are welcome to use photo, video, audio, frottage, and live or private performances in conjunction with the material of stone to develop your art.

In work across and beyond performance, moving image, and sculpture, Neha Choksi probes lived experiences that negotiate relationships in unconventional settings. Harnessing stone to plant, animal to self, friends to institutions, Choksi’s materially bound art engages the terms of our existence in ways personal and planetary. Choksi’s recent stone sculpture poetically distills how stone, glass, and air are co-altered in their encounters; and how our being is shaped through the act of shaping.

Solo Exhibitions
2024 Porous Earth, Project 88, Mumbai (IN). 2021 Urgency and Longing, Galerie Barbara Thumm, New Viewings, Berlin. Uncertain Allies, Kleefeld Contemporary Museum, Long Beach, CA (US). The Weight of the Cave, Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA (US). 2018 Elementary Study, 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA (US). 2017 Faith in friction, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, (UK). Save the translation for later, Project 88, Mumbai. Liberty Matter, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA. 2015 Minds to Lose, Hayward Gallery, London.

Live
2022 Hierarchy Study, The Box Gallery, Los Angeles, co-produced with the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA (US). 2018-2019 Elementary, offsite at a public elementary school, Los Angeles, CA. 2018 Every Kind of Sun, Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka. 2018 How was school today?, 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA. Elementary Sympathy, for measuring with a bent ruler, Actual Size Los Angeles, CA.

Group Exhibitions
2024 Mirror Maze, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi. 2023 To Enter the Sky, Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka. Very Small Feelings, Dhaka Art Summit and KNMA, Delhi. 2022 Knees, Schools, Urges, The Box Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. 2018 Made in L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA. 2016 The Sun’s Rehearsal, Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (AU). 2014 Whorled Explorations, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi (IN). 2012 Quarantania, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (UK). APT 7, Asia Pacific Triennial, QAGOMA, Brisbane (AU). Energy Plus: Mumbai City, Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai (CN).

Publications
In addition to publishing artist writings, Choksi has long served on the editorial board of the Los Angeles-based arts journal, X-TRA, and co-edits Mimesis: Film as Performance Magazine.

www.nehachoksi.com

Foto: Neha Choksi Studios