19.01. -
04.03.2006 Frankfurt am Main
Neeta Madahar
*1966
in London
Education
2004 National Graduate Seminar, The Photography Institute, Columbia University,
New York (USA)
2003 M.F.A. Studio Art, School of the Museum of Fine Arts (S.M.F.A.) and
Tufts
University, Boston, MA (USA)
1999 B.A. Fine Art (First class honours), Winchester School of Art and University of
Southampton, Winchester (GB)
1998 European Socrates Exchange Program - three-month study visit, Barcelona
(E)
1996 Foundation Diploma in Art and Design, City of Bath College, Bath (GB)
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2006 Falling, Julie Saul Gallery, New York
Neeta Madahar : Nature Studies, University Gallery and
Baring Wing, University of
Northumbria, Newcastle (GB)
Nature Studies, Howard
Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA (USA)
Neeta Madahar, Danforth
Museum of Art, Framingham, MA (USA)
Nature Studies, Purdy
Hicks Gallery, London
Nature Studies, Galerie
Poller, Frankfurt am Main
2005 Falling, Fabrica, Brighton (GB)
Neeta Madahar, Institute
of International Visual Arts, London
Sustenance, Julie Saul
Gallery, New York
2004 Sustenance, curated by Martin Parr, Rencontres d’Arles
Photography Festival, Arles (F)
Sustenance, Purdy Hicks
Gallery, London
Sustenance, Howard
Yezerski Gallery, Boston
2003 New Work, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA (USA)
Recent Digital Prints,
Project Space, New England School of Art & Design, Boston
Selected Group Exhibitions
2006 Forest Dreaming, Centre for Contemporary Art and the
Natural World, Exeter (GB)
Going Ape:
Confronting Animals in Contemporary Art, DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA
(USA)
'The Living is Easy':
International Contemporary Photography, Flowers East Gallery, London
Bite Me! Confronting Animals in Contemporary Art,
DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA (USA)
Into the Light of Things,
Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham, GB
Alchemy: Transformations in
Contemporary Photography, Harewood House, Yorkshire (GB)
Collecting, Peter Scott
Gallery, Lancaster University, Lancaster (GB)
Taking Inventory -
Transformation Through Compilation, Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
(USA)
2004 Sanctuary: Photography and the Garden, Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, Brigstock,
Kettering (GB)
Mostyn 2004, Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno, Wales (GB)
Masala: Diversity and Democracy in South Asian Art, William
Benton Museum of
Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs,
CT (USA)
For the Birds, Artspace, New Haven, CT (USA)
2003 Construction – Coincidence?!: Young Photographers from the US,
Momentum Gallery,
Berlin
2003 25hrs - International Video Art Show, Barcelona (E)
2003 “The Witney Biennial 2003”, Tisch Gallery, Tufts
University, Boston
2002 Prequel, Tisch Gallery, Tufts University, Boston
2002 Almost Home, Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MA (USA)
2002 Consideraciones Al Respecto 7, Metrònom, Barcelona (E)
2002 Tanto por Ciento, Domestico ’02, Madrid
2001 Evolveart: Exposición de Arte Digital, Evolvebank, Barcelona and
Madrid (E)
2001 Toy, Gallery fx, Boston
2000 International Selection of Video Art, Centro Cultural de España,
Lima, Peru
1999 It’s Only Paper, Stroud House Gallery, Stroud (GB)
Video work published
2005 Falling, Edition of 3 (+1 AP), 7 minutes, 16:9, on DVD, signed,
numbered,
music (stereo) composed by Miguel d'Oliveira; joint commission from Fabrica
(Brighton), inIVA (Institute of International
Visual Arts, London) and Photoworks, Brighton (GB)
Corporate and Public Collections
DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA (SA)
Deutsche Bank, New York
Fidelity Investments, Boston
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (USA)
Government Art Collection, London
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (USA)
LaSalle Bank, Chicago, IL (USA)
MIT Art Collection, Cambridge, MA (USA)
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, (USA)
University of Warwick Art Collection, Coventry (GB)
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Wellington Management, Boston
Selected Awards and Grants
2006 Braziers International Artists’ Workshop, Oxfordshire (GB)
Visiting photography lecturer at
University College for the Creative Arts, Farnham (GB)
2005 Deutsceh Börse Photography Prize Nominee, The Photographers' Gallery,
London
2005 Joint commission from Fabrica, inIVA (Institute of International
Visual Arts)
and Photoworks (GB)
2005 Arts Council Grant (GB)
2003 Juror’s Award, Member’s Exhibition, Photographic Resource Center at
Boston
University, Boston
2003 Karsh Award for Photography Honourable Mention, S.M.F.A., Boston
2003 Photo District News 2003, Photo Annual (USA)
2000-03 Full Graduate Scholarship, S.M.F.A. and Tufts University, Boston
2002 Boit Award, S.M.F.A., Boston
1999 The Lina Garnade Memorial Trust Award, Winchester School of Art (GB)
Selected Bibliography
> Noble, Andrea (ed) - The Art of Collecting Photography, AVA Publishing
(UK) Ltd., Sep 2006
> Prodger, Michael - Bittersweet Summertime, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine,
Aug 27, 2006
> Coomer, Martin - The Living is Easy, Time Out: London, no. 1879, Aug
23-30, 2006
> Miller Francine - Neeta Madahar, Tema Celeste, Issue 116, Jul-Aug 2006
> McQuaid, Cate - A natural progression, The Boston Globe, May 4, 2006
> Alexander, Jesse - Falling: Neeta Madahar, Hotshoe International, Apr/May
2006
> Noble, Andrea - Nature Studies, Source, Issue 46, Spring 2006
> Kaufman, Kenn - Suspended in Animation, Audubon Magazine, Jan-Feb 2006
> Brown, Chris (ed) - An international practice; Interview, a-n 25, The
Artists Information Company, London
> Zollner, Manfred - Neeta Madahar: Falling (2005), Phototechnik
International, Nov/Dec 2005
> Chandler, David (ed) - Nature Studies, Photoworks, Brighton, England,
October 2005
> Beem, Edgar Allen - A Career Takes Flight, Photo District News Magazine,
Issue 8, Aug 2005
> Herbert, Martin - Neeta Madahar, Time Out: London, No. 1819, Jun 29 – Jul
6, 2005.
> Beyfus, Drusilla - Pecking Order, Telegraph Magazine, Jun 25, 2005
> Brown, Camilla - Neeta Madahar: Sustenance, Portfolio Magazine, No.
41, Jun 2005
> McCormick, Carlo - Neeta Madahar’s Ornithology, Aperture Magazine,
#179, Summer 2005
> Smith, Roberta - Making an Entrance at Any Age, The New York Times, May
6 2005
> Gripp, Anna - Neeta Madahar: Sustenance, Photonews, Sep 2004
> O’Hagan, Sean - Conceptual art, It’s a piece of cake…, The Observer, Jul
18, 2004
> Jobey, Liz - The World in Miniature, The Guardian, Jul 14, 2004
> Horton, C. Sean - Boston, Massachusetts: Review of Sustenance, Art
Papers, May/Jun 2004
> Zitzewitz, Karin - Mapping South Asian Art, Art India, Vol. 9, # 2,
Quarter 2, 2004
> Hak, Marriaine - Bird in the Bush, American Photo on Campus, Mar 2004
> McQuaid, Cate - It’s trouble in paradise, in sharp, funny focus, The
Boston Globe, Feb 27, 2004
> Millis, Christopher - Terrible beauty, The Boston Phoenix, Feb 20, 2004
> Markonish, Denise (ed) - For the Birds, Artspace, New Haven,
Connecticut, U.S., Jan 2004
> Shaw, Genevieve - Beauty is in her own backyard, Metrowest Daily News, Jun
5, 2003
> Cavouras, Krissa - Light and Shadow, American Photo on Campus, Jan 2003
> Parcellin, Paul - Review of Almost Home, Art Papers Magazine, Nov/Dec
2002
> Belz, Emily-Almost Home: Photographers Exploring Dom. Space,Art New
England,Oct/Nov 2002
> Mineo, Liz - The magic of photography, Framingham Tab, Jun 21, 2002
> Silver, Joanne - Photo exhibit makes you feel at ‘Home,’ Boston Herald,
Jun 7, 2002
> Suárez, Josina - El Ratón Se Ha Comido Al Pincel, El Pais, Jan 19, 2001
> Front cover - B4P14, AN Magazine, Aug 2000
 Sustenance Series >>> more |
 Falling Series >>> more |
|
The Sky is Falling Things fall from the sky: rain falls, snow falls, night falls, bombs fall; and in our dreams, like Icarus, we fall, falling into nothing, into oblivion. And what if the sky itself falls? In popular myths and fairytales the falling sky is a common figure for irrational or unnecessary fears, and yet its transformational images – of air become solid, of gravity become heavy matter, of space itself collapsing upon us – are potent and enduring symbols of the ultimate apocalypse. This potency remains perhaps because the idea of staring up at the sky weaves myth and reality together. Arching across civilisations the sky has been mapped and studied for guidance (both emotional and physical), for signs of salvation and for portents of the future, but this has coexisted with another kind of watching, one tied to everyday dependencies and very real threats of natural and man-made disaster. As an image of infinite space, of freedom and hope the sky also represents uncertain destinies and holds the spectre of uncontrollable destructive power; it is both the beginning and the end. Neeta Madahar’s new video and photographic work Falling touches on these broad mythic associations, and yet they are framed in a way that, at first sight, presents something very simple, innocent and child-like. The video animation for Falling unfolds as a languorous dream, a visual balm of gently spinning sycamore seeds falling from a blue, cloud-scattered sky. Madahar’s idea for the work was to reconstruct personal childhood memories of playing with the ‘helicopter’ seeds as part of a new imaginary space, and in the process expand those memories into a new temporal experience in which the fleeting moment, that element of playful excite-ment – so difficult to grasp and remember – becomes an extended and extravagantly detailed reverie. In Fal-ling the child’s thrill at nature’s trick, one that works more or less every time, becomes a slow meditation on the state of wonder itself and on a delicate balance struck between gravity and nature’s own plan to resist it; the small-scale marvel becomes something more symphonic. As the seeds of Falling turn their way through time, and as they appear to come closer and closer to the viewer, they suggest different journeys and transitions, from one place and from one state to another. Falling, for example, might be seen as a metaphor for migration and the idea of journeys open to chance, and to ran-dom patterns of settlement and growth. Although there would be an obvious connection to Madahar’s cultural background in this (she was born in England from Indian parents who arrived here in the 1960s), in Falling she is more interested in the personal journeys that might be suggested by wind blown seeds. The film sug-gests her excitement at the idea of drifting, of a chance taken; at the sense of possibility in moving from place to place and approaching unknown horizons. And, while the still photograph Landed appears to bring a sense of resolution to those journeys, the stream in this image is another hint of restlessness and movement, as the water carries away its share of seeds it suggests different journeys and different narratives intertwined. But the implied journeys in Falling are not just cultural and geographic. As the falling seeds are rendered in ever-greater detail, we are reminded that the child’s playful sense of wonder is changed with education into a different kind of curiosity. As the flight patterns of sycamore seeds become the basis of science-class ex-periments, and nature’s magic takes on a more rational character, seeing also shifts into observation. We might notice, for example, if we watch closely enough, that one of the falling seeds is split in two allowing quiet notes of imperfection and difference creep into the picture. We are encouraged to look and learn in the great tradition of nature study, where examining and recording has its own kind of wonder, an obsessive al-most guilty pleasure. Madahar has spoken of her work dealing with ‘our need to meet nature on our own terms’ and both Falling and the other work in this book, Sustenance, connect with the comforting thought, again so familiar from the classroom, that nature’s wonders can be found close to home, and that our imaginative |
responses to them might begin here too. But, although born in this domestic context, both works revel in its strangeness; subur-ban nature studies are heightened into a kind of surreal drama, in which our spatial coordinates are confused and things – still and moving – seem artificial, transmuted into a glowing hyperreality. If the Sustenance pho-tographs remind us of dioramas (those birds are too perfect for life), then the status of the digitally recast seeds in Falling is similarly uncertain. Their spiralling motion is too mechanical, it is mesmerically wrong, and their represented form – indeterminate images somewhere between coloured drawing and photograph – be-comes almost grotesque in its unwavering precision and distorted scale as the seeds reach the foreground and drift beyond the frame. So, if the seed fall begins in wonderment it ends, like confetti showers and ticker-tape parades, in a kind of delirium. For Madahar, an important element of her film’s restaging of memory was that it should be a physi-cal as well as a visual experience, that we should imagine these sycamore seeds falling around us and brushing against our face. She enjoys the ambiguity of this implied sensation; pleasure and a sense of aban-don tinged with discomfort and loss of control. Excitement and anxiety, as Freud noted about ‘typical’ dreams such as those of flying and falling, are closely related, and Madahar’s film draws on that tension. However, if we are increasingly keen to link extraordinary dreams to commonplace experiences and in a sense to de-fuse them, if the self-styled ‘dream doctors’ of the internet happily attribute falling dreams to a simple lack of stability in our lives, then Falling surely alludes to something else in the irresistible downward pull of gravity, to something deeper that taps into another, larger-scale reservoir of human fear and anxiety about falling through time and space. Although the reference is not specific, Madahar admits that something of the events of 9/11 2001 in the US have left a trace in her film. The epic tragedy and mind-numbing horror of the attacks on New York in particular took its most terrible form in those desperate figures of people driven to jump from the ‘twin towers’ to their deaths. In these images our deepest insecurities about the strange dis-junctions of scale that underpin the fabric of our world were chillingly played out, the assurances of technol-ogy and progress evaporating into a sickeningly visceral waking dream. All that is left is the body, alone; with an unthinkable velocity losing consciousness and humanity as it is pulled inexorably towards the end. It is not surprising that the photographs and video clips of this appalling sight have since become taboo in the media and elsewhere, a kind of pornography. Respect for the deceased would be a good enough reason for this, but the thought lingers that we may also be too close to these images’ sense of deep trauma, that it is perhaps their eerie familiarity from our worst imaginings that has made them intolerable and that has, in turn, helped to suppress them. These disturbing psychological connections are difficult to contemplate, and potentially overwhelming for a work of art with many resonances, but the anthropomorphism of Madahar’s work, already noted by Carlo McCormick in relation to Sustenance, is powerfully present in Falling. It is significant that in the main se-quence of her film Madahar’s sycamore seeds do not fall from a tree but appear, initially as an indistinct visi-tation of black shapes, from nowhere, straight out of the sky. In this subtle narrative ploy the universality of the film is established. Falling spans time; not just the extended moment of its reverie but in its intimations of birth, life and death and in its profoundly elegiac scattering of souls. David Chandler August 2005 Essay for the book on Neeta Madahar’s work Nature Studies. |
© Neeta Madahar &
GALERIE POLLER
Brückenstrasse 9-11
60594 Frankfurt am Main Germany
Phone +49(0)69-624042
mail-ffm@galerie-poller.com
547 West 27th Street, 2nd Floor New York NY
10001 USA Phone (212) 967 5700
mail-nyc@galerie-poller.com
www.galerie-poller.com