Recent Alumnus Vikram Divecha '19 Featured in Three Exhibits this Winte

January 29, 2020

Visual Arts alum Vikram Divecha '19 has work featured in exhibits in Dubai and Washington D.C. this winter.

In Dubai, the galleries Isabelle van den Eynde and Warehouse 421 have two shows with Divecha’s work: Towards Opacity, a solo exhibit, and How to maneuver. In Washington D.C., The Corner at Whitman-Walker presents a group exhibit titled We First Arrived…

Divecha’s solo exhibit Towards Opacity features the artist’s video work, installations, wood sculptures, and paintings. According to the gallery, “In Towards Opacity, Divecha engages with two distinct apparatuses of capture and display—the Metropolitan Museum of Art and his iPhone SE - in order to explore notions of failure, fugitivity and opacity.” His 10-minute-long video and installation Gallery 354 (2019), for instance, is a response to the namesake gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s southwest wing, which houses objects from Melanesia.

Divecha works with the subdued lighting at Gallery 354 as a departure point work, resulting in a meditation on exposure, failure, time, loss and darkness. Also in the gallery is The relationship between wood and sunlight (2018), which Divecha created from scraps from the wood shop at Columbia University. Using these scraps, he fashioned a miniature reimagining of Gallery 354. The pieces in this gallery all relate, in some aspect, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. According to the gallery, “Divecha has proposed to the MET a light intervention which would be operating the massive blinds in Gallery 354. This proposal is still under consideration by the institution.” The show closes on March 14.

Warehouse 421’s group exhibit How to maneuver: Shape-shifting texts and other publishing tactics, collects art that works across the space between mainstream publishing and independent publishing. According to the gallery, “The space that separates these different regimes of authorship, publishing and readership, is also the space where these differences can be maneuvered⁠—where limits are creatively questioned and hardened practices lured to speak in different tongues.”

The Corner at Whitman-Walker is a relatively new art space based in D.C. The show When We First Arrived… works with the art and activism group Do you know where the children are? In this show, each work incorporates, or represents an actual account (in whole or in part) from a child who was separated from their family and detained by the U.S. government. According to the gallery, “This text may be in the native language of the child or a translation into English. The accounts are taken from the interviews that were conducted by the Flores investigators that included legal, medical and mental health experts who visited the detention facilities six months ago in June of 2019.” When We First Arrived… runs until March 29.

Divecha currently lives and works between Dubai and New York. His conceptual and collaborative practice has developed around what he calls 'found processes’⁠—those forces and capacities at work within urban systems. By realigning social and economic relations his projects often bring invisible structures into plain view, to raise questions about agency, ethics and value. Divecha’s engagements translate into site-specific works, public art, installations, video, photography and drawings.