Chaos, exploitation and Mumbai: Experience a small slice of Hema Upadhyay's art
The artist was one of the brightest of her generation.
In 2001, Hema Upadhyay heard about nuclear tensions between India and Pakistan and their plans to build reactors. Concerned about humanity creating the medium to destroy itself, the artist decided she would turn to her own craft to illustrate her anxiety. Upadhyay hand-crafted two thousand life-size cockroaches and installed them across a gallery in Syndey, Australia as a way of imagining an entire world full of cockroaches.
Upadhyay, who was found dead this week in a murder case that police are currently investigating, always found a way to invite chaos into her work. Much of that came from the setting she chose to work both in and with: Mumbai.
"So much chaos in my work actually came from the city," she told initiArt magazine. "When I work in my studio in Mumbai, there are lots of elements, of decay, of life, of chaos. It’s a double-edged condition when you see development in the making – you see growth but decay, you see modern skyscrapers but the mushrooming of slums, etc. It is the dichotomy which existed within us and outside us as well."
As a migrant to Mumbai herself, Upadhya spoke often of the experience of moving to the big city and learning to understand what that really meant. Her very first solo exhibition, called Sweet Sweat Memories in 2001, incorporate her own photographs with paintings to convey her experience of migration.
"Sweet Sweat Memories speak of a sense of alienation and loss and at the same time a feeling of awe and excitement one usually feels when in a new place," the artwork's description explains. "The large mixed media on paper works on display were inspired by the suicide of one of her neighbours as well as the confusion that arose in her as a result of living in an urban sprawl where dream and aspirations are both excited and forcefully repressed."
"I think I see my works as a whole, because one idea leads to another. From the physical aspect to the mental aspect, how the landscape affects you and what it does to the people," Upadhyay told initiArt magazine. "For example, this is a new installation [Twin Souls (2010)] that I am working on. I have 60 ready-made toys of birds flying in circular motion. This sort of movement is actually seen as a disease, animal madness. In most cases, it happens because the animals couldn’t adapt to the new environment. So I pick up the movement and relate it to the human conditions, the claustrophobia and schizophrenic in the city."