Hema Upadhyay

Born 1972 in Baroda, Gujarat, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India From a high vantage point – above the shacks with their blue plastic cover-ings seeking to ward off the merciless rain – Hema Upadhyay looks out across her city, Mumbai. Upadhyay views the city as a provisory entity that may disappear or be removed at any time, a disturbing object of desire. By placing photographs of herself in her works she looks for her own place within this city of dreams. Her paintings, collages, and sculptural installations keep coming back to themes such as one’s native soil, loss, migration, and belonging. Upadhyay was born and raised in Baroda, where, in the early 1990s, she began studying painting and subsequently graphic art at the Faculty of Fine Arts. While still a student, she began infusing her works with personal narratives. In 1998 she moved to Mumbai to embark on a new life in this metropolitan city. In her mind, this relocation became intermingled with her family’s memories of their enforced relocation from Pakistan in connection with the 1947 Partition. She peopled her surfaces with photographs of herself while struggling to gain access to her new city. I Have a Feeling That I Belong, a work from 2001 – part of a series entitled Sweet, Sweat Memories – sees the artist poised on the balcony of a tall building, letting her gaze glide across the complex while her body is balanced precariously close to the edge. Critics have interpreted this autobiographical positioning of herself in the role of the main protagonist as a gender-specific comment on spatial issues. These works are characterised by a deliberate play with scale, dimensions, and a sense for diminishing forms, for reducing scale. A particularly poignant work from 2002 was a site-specific installation entitled The Space in Between You and Me created for the Khoj International Artists’ Workshop in Mysore. Upadhyay wrote a letter to her family by sowing millet seeds in the soil. The letters sprung up, grew, and gradually withered away – “as if they never existed”. As far back as 2002 she had already begun work on the first versions of her site-specific installation depicting Dharavi in Mumbai, Asia’s largest slum. If, in earlier works, her multifaceted self enjoyed a sense of freedom and imagination, hovering in the sky above the confines of the slums, the installation Dream a Wish – Wish a Dream was more directly concerned with the materiality of existence, with its details – and with a confrontation with the vulnerability that characterises modern urban life in third-world cities. The installation 8 feet x 12 feet (2009) – which is made out of aluminium sheets, car scraps, enamel paints, tarpaulins, pieces of metal and found objects – swallows up the room, creating a compact whole. Upadhyay is interested in space in its physical sense – in the people, objects, dwellings, and roads that fill out the space and make the city come alive. The installa-tions bring about a bodily experience, possessed of a strong physical at-traction, while also celebrating the wishes, dreams, and hopes that are part of life in the slums, too. Vidya Shivadas

Hema Upadhyay 8 feet x 12 feet, 2009