In the present exhibition titled ‘Extra-Ordinary’, Hema Upadhyay explores the subtexts of these two disparate words – the ordinariness of an ‘extra’ life that the metropolis offers its citizens. Unlike the overall decorative patterning of her earlier work (often used as a visual camouflage) within which the body/city conversed, fluid design appears at the edges of these paintings, framed within frames of overlapping narratives. Fixated at the centre in sombre dark hues of polluted grey and sleazy black, the decaying city emerges out of a bordered beauty. The actual and fictive, imagined and remembered city are evoked through personal and social worlds of the artist; she frames the canvases with the Bombay skyline that are seen in picture postcards and advertising lingua and zooms with imaginary binoculars onto real issues of environmental degradation and the apathy that governs our existence. Plastic objects, toys, fruit-bowls, animals and vegetables lie half-submerged in black waters; flamingos feed on toxic marshes while the city planners shake hands on a land development deal, texts about urbanity sprout amidst imagined greenery whilst the artist’s dismembered hands try to hold the scattered imagery together. These texts are quotes from thinkers who have ruminated on modernity and development and the surface appearances of urban landscapes clash with its inner decay. Are the floating bodies living or dead, what are the markers of achievement in the money economy when human bodies pile on one another for space and breath?

The works are an amalgamation of painted surfaces and photographic cut-outs, shots of the Real City encounter imaginary worlds, the artifice of globalization creating a bizarre beauty that holds onto itself through delicate threads. The onslaught of metropolitan life and our struggles to preserve our subjectivities gives rise to an ontological insecurity; in the production of cities lies the hidden workings of desire and fear.Through the tropes of doubling and concealment Upadhyay beings together politics and poetics, urging us to understand the darkness of our lived moments, questioning the future of her city that lies threatened with the destruction of its own discovery. The exhibition is held at Vadehera Art Gallery, New Delhi.

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