Portraying transient nostalgia and a sense of dislocation marks Hema Upadhyay’s practice

Hema Upadhyay primarily employs sculptural installations and photography in her endeavor to explore notions of gender, identity and dislocation in her art. Combining various dissonant elements, the artist evokes a lingering sense of transient nostalgia transcending any specific place or time.

She personalizes it through self-portraiture, unveiling an imaginary landscape to facilitate an interaction with both fictional and the fantastic. In essence portraying transient nostalgia and a sense of dislocation marks Hema Upadhyay’s practice. The idea is to chronicle the individualized perspective of a larger phenomenon of migration and displacement.

Explaining this aspect of her art, she has said, ”Living in the city that churns desires, I juxtapose two different mediums, namely Photography and Painting. Self-image, essentially functions as a resistance-mechanism, projecting insecurities of rootless-ness and dilemmas of existential crisis in a big city.”

This facet of her art at some level jells with the broader theme of a new group show at Museum of the Seam, Jerusalem. The works on view attempt to deal with the sanctification of the home as an enclosed, secure and homogenous space on the one hand, and its total deconstruction as a private space, on the other hand.

Hema Upadhyay’s paintings portray the idea of ‘home’ as one bringing a sense of dislocation in the process of violently displacing people. They jell with the core concern raised by the participating artists including her map contours of the private and the national home as something, which needs to be constantly redefined, in spite of the difference between them.

This is because the political may invade the home, and the private home can become politicized time and again. Her works echo the theme; they depict often to ‘home’, not as an abode of security, but to voice sense of desolation felt by hapless people wanting a root and roof, but being forced pushed out.