Beauty Decay

Hema Upadhyay’s practice, spanning photography, collage, assemblage, sculpture and installation, focuses on the blind spots of memory and identity, alienation and loss by juxtaposing her personal history with the history of India and Pakistan. Meditating on the ideological and visual categories of representation, Upadhyay contemplates the potentiality of images to dismantle historically defined roles and connotations. Her artistic production involves site-specific installations that incorporate everyday materials and found objects, as well as compositions created with thousands of grains of rice.

Upadhyay’s diptych work, "Beauty and Decay", initially appears as an almost blank surface. A closer examination, however, reveals a vast landscape of long-grain rice meticulously glued onto handmade paper. Inscribed on these grains are a total of 69 quotations centred around the themes of “beauty” and “decay”. These quotations consist of aphorisms about life and living beings, authored by philosophers and spiritual leaders commonly regarded as “moral idols” whose wisdom serves as a source of inspiration. Placing an ironic distance between the viewer and the written words, Beauty and Decay invites visitors to use magnifying glasses, placed on wooden shelves in front of the two panels, to navigate the quotations on a rugged topography. These minuscule writings, almost invisible to the naked eye, require a painstaking reading with deep contemplation, unveiling their secrets only to those willing to look closely.