Iceboat

In her emotionally-charged videos, performances, installations and prints, Mumbai-based artist Neha Choksi wrestles with questions of time, the erasure of the self and nature’s inherent capacity for renewal.

In Iceboat (2012-13), Choksi, dressed like a renunciate, rows a boat made of ice until it melts, releasing her into the water’s womb. The boat becomes an extension of the artist’s body as she calmly persists in her endeavor to float despite the inevitability of collapse and decay– the final erasure of the body that is death. The video begins with underwater shots from the end of the original performance, showing Choksi diving in the water surrounded by the remnants of the boat– an image that evokes Indic notions of the soul, freed at death from its vessel, the body. The camera then moves above ground and the act unfolds from the beginning.

As the Iceboat begins to melt and topple towards the end, the artist seems to experience fleeting despair. But ultimately, Choksi embraces her surrender–a painful moment of loss redeemed by the possibility of rebirth. Viewed in Kochi, the sea breeze adds another layer to this work– exhuming narratives of doomed voyages of the past, the many sunken expeditions that define a coast as much as the ones that made it.