Accumulated Consciousness:
An interview with Hema Upadhyay

Rajesh Punj

Mumbai based artist Hema Upadhyay appears utterly affected by the cityscape, as she explains of movement and migration as though it were a modern disease inflicted upon the masses. As they haplessly criss-cross the world as a consequence of conflict, and in the cause of personal advancement. While her contemporary Jitish Kallat professes to sift through the city’s daily detritus for the inspiration for many of his artworks, Upadhyay acts as ethnographer, observing everything from a distance, before scrupulously scrutinising over the details with a forensic eye. In what could be described as an attempt to address the city’s open wounds; as her adopted home buckles and bends under the weight of so many infrastructural deficiencies, and as a consequence there is in her work an incredible level of assembled sophistication that draws
aspiration and ambition from the cold calculations of volume and vice.