Why You So Negative?

2022 Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca, NY

2019 Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA

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The opening exhibition, at Human Resources LA, was supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Photos by Maria Kanevskaya

The artist Chiraag Bhakta’s collection of grassroots-level meditation and yoga marketing material starting from the 1950’s, reflects both his own personal relationship, as an Indian American, with yoga and its migration to today’s Western context in which it is systematically mined and commercialized and stripped of its historical context. This installation, #WhitePeopleDoingYoga, draw parallels with industrial colonization, now adding another conquest to its collection, this one with some “positivity.”

#WhitePeopleDoingYoga was first shown at The Asian Art Museum (SF) in 2014. This installation has been updated to respond to the institutional rebranding and dilution of this work, mapping how an installation examining the commodification of yoga in Western culture was ironically ‘sanitized’ for the consumption and comfort of a white audience. Through an assemblage of collected printed correspondence, Why You So Negative? brings the viewer behind the scenes to witness the stifling personal experience of the artist with two major art institutions in the US, recording the ways that museums can be dangerously complicit with gatekeeping creative expression and rounding the edges of difficult truths. Why You So Negative? first opened at Human Resources (LA) in 2019.
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Mother Jones Magazine Op-Ed by Chiraag Bhakta
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Programming included a performance by Nikhil Chopra
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Supporting Essays by Anuradha Vikram, Vivek Boray and Vijay Iyer