Team Cafe
Acclaimed for her photography and sculptural installations since 1998, Hema Upadhya was invited to participate in Sunaparanta’s Sensorium festival in Goa this year. Little was she to know that this would be her last works before she was snatched so brutally from this life a couple of days ago. Her works will nonetheless continue to endure and inspire and her last work commissioned for the project will be on display as a tribute to this brilliantly creative artist.
In a condolence note, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Honorary Director, Sensorium, and Isheta Salgaocar, Executive Producer, Sensorium, pay tribute to this talented artist. “Perhaps it’s true: in the end what endures is the work. When we commissioned Hema Upadhya, via her gallerist Roshini Vadehra, to create a new work for Sensorium we had no idea it would also be one of the last things she would shape with her talented hands. The work features rice grains with minute hand lettering; the rice is patterned to make the outline of a man and a woman’s face; there are two frames. The words speak of love, and its faltering, the sort of conversation lovers might have to figure why things did not work out. I believe her work responds to the idea that love has a greater failure rate than success but our ability to love again is a testament that we are not defeated by our defeat. Just as love does not fade with the retreat of a lover, an artist’s work has endurance transcendent of mortality.
Tania Dasgupta approached us to launch the book she made for her husband, the late Prabuddha Dasgupta. For this we created a shrine with doves, pomegranates, coral, ginger blossoms. In the shrine we put the books, the photographs in the pages of this book, almost an altarpiece. After making this we had paused to gaze at the fine works of Upadhya installed in the next room. It was not yet a shrine – who might have known? – but it had a great quietness to it, life reproaching love for its conceit, and language reconciled with that silence is somehow how we shall now speak with the ones we tried to love most. In the final analysis everything is forgotten, except love and art.”
Installation artist Subodh Kerkar, who had the privilege of showcasing his works along with Hema Upadhya a decade ago in Mumbai and recently at the Kochi Muziris Biennale, recalls her work. “She was a brilliantly creative and intelligent artist who did a lot of conceptual work. I recall in Kochi we had both done works about rice. While mine was paddy, hers was rice stuck on large canvas with words written on it. She was a very important artist and her work will be missed,” he states.
Hema Upadhya’s enduring legacy will continue to live in her works.
