Confronting an emigrant's struggle to belong in a new place, Hema Upadhyay's work narrates her personal and artistic transition to Bombay. Born in Baroda and trained in painting and printmaking there at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Upadhyay shifted to Bombay after completing her education. Having experienced a journey paralleling that of the hordes who arrive in Bombay seeking work each year, the artist became a self-aware agent for the anonymous urban migrant. In her renderings of displacement, Upadhyay privileges her own impressions of the urban landscape and the performative gesture.
Read MoreUpadhyay's first solo exhibition, Sweet-Sweat Memories, in 2001, presented the architecture of the artist's experience from multiple perspectives. Pasting miniaturized, cut-out photographs of herself onto large mixed-media paintings, the artist alternated aerial and subaltern perspectives of an overwhelmed and overwhelming city. Her work reaches beyond the visualization of physical spaces to remember the emotional and physical remnants of resettlement. Included in that exhibition, I Have a Feeling that I Belong, 2000, was Upadhyay's hazy, autobiographical declaration of Bombay as her home.
Updahyay further engaged the metaphors of migration in The Space in Between You and Me, a site-specific installation at the Khoj International Artists' Workshop in Mysore, 2002. The artist used freshly-tilled ground to plant seeds that, when sprouted, spelled a letter to her mother. Implicit was the interplay between trace and impermanence, as the message would first become overgrown but then disappear once Upadhyay was not there to garden it.
In Made in China, a collaborative installation executed with Chintan Upadhyay in 2003, the artists strung Chinese goods at varying heights along one gallery wall. The installation abstracted objects of ordinary and outlandish utility from their intended customers, reflecting the changing capital of imported items and the expanded culture of consumerism in India today. For the Vasl International Artists' Residency in Karachi in 2003, Upadhyay's spectacular sculpture Loco-Foto-Moto painstakingly balanced masses of matchsticks to form a hanging, suspended chandelier.
First executed in the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Mumbai (2004), followed by a much larger version in Lille, France (2006), Upadhyay's installation Dream a Wish, engineered a meticulous microcosm of Dharavi, the largest slum in Bombay and all of Asia. Further developing earlier themes of space and urbanity, the artist fashioned and painted each element of the reconstruction using plastics and hardware materials, with recycled car scraps and aluminium sheets as a ground. — Beth Citron
