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

Hema Upadhyay

Hema Upadhyay

"I like to tell any stories, whether real or imaginative. These are even reflections of one's phobias, shortcomings. The recurring theme in my work is autobiographical. In addition, it is the cathartic factor that becomes the reason to take these objects and convert their ability. Yes…my work is cathartic in process."

Hema Upadhyay was born in Baroda in 1972, and completed her Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in painting and printmaking respectively from the Fine Arts Faculty of the M S University there. In the short time that Hema has had to develop her career (she graduated with her MFA in 1997), she has already taken giant steps and established herself very firmly among the new generation of Indian contemporary artists.

Upadhyay was the recipient of a National Scholarship from the Ministry of Human Resources, and also has to her credit annual awards from the Gujarat Lalit Kala Academy and the national Lalit Kala Academy for her work in the 10th International Triennale - India hosted in New Delhi.

Her talent was immediately recognized and Hema has been invited to showcase in her work in many group shows, even whilst she was in college, the most prestigious being the 4th and 5th annual 'Harmony' shows, 'Ideas and Images 2' at the NGMA, Mumbai and 'Mumbai Metaphor' hosted by the Tao Art Gallery.

Now settled and working in Mumbai, this Baroda artist and her painter husband, Chintan Upadhyay, have collaborated and worked together for many exhibitions. Most recently the duo worked jointly to create billboard and poster art for a show called 'Parthenogenesis' at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery on the campus of the Australian University of New South Wales. Labeled as 'kitsch' by some viewers and critics, the work Hema and Chintan produced is definitely a tongue-in-cheek statement, not necessarily against, but about the mass production and popular imagery that has taken over almost every aspect of urban life. Hema explains, saying, "Besides using pop imagery, our posters take a dig at our hybrid 'global' lifestyle."

Earlier, in 2001, Hema for the first time exhibited her work abroad, also in Australia. For an installation titled 'The Nymph and the Adult', she sculpted nearly 2000 lifelike cockroaches, infesting the gallery with them, to draw repulsion as well as fascination from her viewers. There was a purpose, however, to this display. At a very politically and militarily tense time in the South Asian Subcontinent, it raised the question on everyone's mind. Would cockroaches be the only survivors?

In the same year, Upadhyay held her first solo exhibition at the Chemould Art Gallery in Mumbai. Titled 'Sweet - Sweat Memories', 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. The title work in this show encapsulates these feelings perfectly. It is a close up of a mouth, wide and smiling, only to reveal the decay and decadence that lurks everywhere.

Hema Upadhyay lives and works in Mumbai.