Divya Mehra
»Prelude to collapsing Op. 28 No. 4 / him and I in the middle of the afternoon / passing out for chopin / fainting by the park and learning to breathe again«, USA 2007
Video, colour, sound, 4:21 min.
Composer: Frédéric Chopin, Music Publisher: Mutopia, License:Public Domain, Creative Commons
Courtesy of Divya Mehra

Divya Mehra, »Prelude to collapsing Op. 28 No. 4 / him and I in the middle of the afternoon / passing out for chopin / fainting by the park and learning to breathe again«, USA, 2007, Videostill, Courtesy of Divya Mehra

August 25 – September 27, 2012

Invited by Anthony Kiendl (Executive / Artistic director, Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg / Canada)

»Prelude to collapsing Op. 28 No. 4 / him and I in the middle of the afternoon / passing out for chopin / fainting by the park and learning to breathe again«, USA 2007

Divya Mehra’s »Prelude to collapsing Op. 28 No. 4 | him and I in the middle of the afternoon | passing out for chopin | fainting by the park and learning to breathe again« is one of three videos documenting performances by the artist in New York in 2007. The video documents the artist’s simple act of collapsing outdoors on a public sidewalk. This act, simultaneously eloquent and unpleasant, offers a range of registers from the quotidian to the comic to the epically metaphysical. These un-scripted performances are physical propositions that explore human interaction, and speak volumes as gestures of failure, entropy, and perseverance.

Bas Jan Ader, an artist similarly fascinated by collapse, demonstrates a transcription of the fall, from the transcendent to the supine, in several short films including »Fall II« (Amsterdam, 1970) in which the artist plunges from his bicycle into a canal. Mehra’s work shares Ader’s melancholy tinged with humour, and a sense of the inexplicable. Where Mehra diverges from Ader’s entropic course is that she always recovers from the fall, foregrounding her interaction with passers-by, her subsequent recovery, and disembarking from the scene. It is as if Mehra too is stating the line that closes Beckett’s novel  »The Unnamable«, a monologue of a presumably immobile protagonist: »…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.«

Text: Anthony Kiendl

Divya Mehra (*1981, BFA Honors University of Manitoba, School of Art, Winnipeg, MB; MFA Columbia University, School of the Arts, New York, NY) Mehra's practice draws from experiences of displacement, cultural conventions, and hybridization, infusing a biting wit in the execution of her projects. Connecting political and religious icons with popular Hip-Hop culture, Mehra examines cross-cultural appropriations and the parallels between family tension and nationalistic conflict. Her work investigates the construction and misrepresentation of cultural identity while making reference to layered divisions and the disparity and exploitation of power. Her work has been included in a number of exhibitions and screenings across North America and overseas, most notably at Queens Museum and Lincoln Center (NY), MASS MoCA (North Adams), Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), ArtSpeak (Vancouver), The Images Festival and A Space (Toronto), Groupe Intervention Vidéo (Montréal), The Beijing 798 Biennale (Beijing, China), and Latitude 28 (New Delhi, India). Mehra currently divides her time between Winnipeg, Delhi, and New York.