Contemporary Arts Center
Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center
for Contemporary Art
44 E. 6th Street,
Cincinnati, OH 45202
513 345 8400
Hema Upadhyay
Started
09
February
2013
Ended
05
May
2013
Exhibition Details
Hema Upadhyay addresses the aesthetic qualities of the everyday via imagery taken from the slums and densely populated neighborhoods of Mumbai, India. The center piece of the exhibition will be Upadhyay’s Modernization which is inspired by the slum community of Dharavi in Mumbai. Upadhyay is fascinated by urbanization and its effect on an ever-grown Mumbai. Once Dharavi occupied an undesirable piece of marshland outside of the city, but as the city began to expand, the area occupied by the slum became a central part of the city and subsequently, highly contested. Upadhyay is drawn to the microcosm of the slum and its relationship to the surrounding posh neighborhoods. The installation, Modernization, recreates an aerial view of the slum on the floor of the gallery made up of the materials that the buildings themselves are comprised of—aluminum sheets, car scrap, enamel paint, plastic sheets, and found objects. Upadhyay is attracted to the aesthetic traits of Dharavi, an area marked by the juxtaposition of vibrant colors and diverse materials. In this installation these visual signifiers are distilled into a minimalist patchwork of squares. Upadhyay was born in Baroda, India in 1972 and is currently based in Mumbai. She has shown at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan; the MACRO Museum in Rome, Italy; and The Saatchi Gallery in London, England among many other leading museums and galleries worldwide. This is her first exhibition in the United States.