Partners in life and work, Doyel Joshi and Neil Ghose Balser of Mumbai-based How Are You Feeling Studio met while studying at Parsons in New York. They grew up in different parts of the world—Balser in a village in Germany and Joshi in the suburbs of Mumbai. She had a love of daydreaming, dance, and film. Balser, whose mother is half-Indian, grew up surrounded by poetry and creativity, drawn to dance, music, design, and theater.
Dating and collaboration went hand in hand for the pair. Their first collaboration was on a film that has yet to be released. In that process, they noticed how well they worked together. There wasn’t just an ease or respect for each other’s vision—the process felt freeing, safe, and without judgment. Their eventual first official work together became their wedding in Rajasthan, full of immersive installations, cascading sculptures, and eye-catching architectural interventions. And the title of their studio, How Are You Feeling, came from their way of consistently checking in with each other.
That has grown into installations like Provenance, a sculpture of bright red blocks of ice at the Ice Factory Ballard Estate in Mumbai, and later the India Art Fair; as well as an interactive performance of artisans in A Stone Marries an Egg; and, recently, Into the Pinke, part of the sā Ladakh land art festival in Ladakh, India last year. Whitewall spoke with the pair about their method of creating from a place of care and love.
Doyel Joshi and Neil Ghose Balser, photo by Manan Sheth. Courtesy of How Are You Feeling Studio
“Provenance IAF,” photo by Saurabh Suryan. Courtesy of How Are You Feeling Studio
WHITEWALL: Your first work together officially as how you are feeling like was your marriage What made you like decide to finally take that leap to name working together?
NEIL GHOSE BALSER: It wasn’t so much a conscious choice. It was a deeply emotional and personally important event for us both in our love and in our relationship, but also in the larger context of what a wedding means in India, strongly connected to the families coming together.
That process was one of understanding how we feel because if we go by our conditioning. That became our access into making decisions for how we want to facilitate a space where all these people are coming together in this moment. Our partnership embodies, on the one hand, love, and on the other hand, our work. We realized, “This is our creative practice.” That felt natural to us.
“Our partnership embodies, on the one hand, love, and on the other hand, our work,”
Neil Ghose Balser
DOYEL JOSHI: We go back to that when we’re questioning or when we’re in a moment of doubt even now. There was an alchemy of things that facilitated that moment and that type of courage, that energy.
Art Born from Courage
“A Stone Marries an Egg,” photo by Saurabh Suryan.photo by Saurabh Suryan. Courtesy of How Are You Feeling Studio
WW: I love this word, “courage.” And you’ve talked about this kind of, post-ironic place, that your practice is earnest, real, that it comes from our heart. That does feel courageous. How did that experience then lead you to a next artwork, A Stone Marries an Egg?
DJ: I think the alchemy really is stronger, the more we play with the resources. And that’s what we mean by courage too, right? If you want to create something, one can look at resources that exist and create through them. And if you create through the resources that you have, you will make something that is honest, automatically.
NGB: And something that is relatable.
DJ: It creates a big emotion in the audience and us. Honestly, I think we enjoy it the most. So for A Stone Marries an Egg, Neil’s brother had given us a wedding present of bringing the work we did in Rajasthan for our wedding to Mumbai. He gifted us three days in a beautiful location to show our large installation of red fabric flowers. While we were in the space, we realized that the reason why our wedding works were impactful was the context—and that we could not simply change the context just because we had a space in Mumbai.
The 20,000 flowers of scrap fabric were made by women in Deoria, U.P. where my sister runs a social business with 300 women. The beauty really is the source of where it came from. So I asked my sister, “Do you think that we can bring the women to Mumbai and let them do what they do?” We’ll simply relocate the process, displace them into this gallery space. And, of course, it’s not that simple because it’s layered in class politics and it’s layered in caste politics and it’s layered in why they wanted to come. Eventually, it blurred the lines between who the audience was, who the performers were, what the art was.
“It blurred the lines between who the audience was, who the performers were, what the art was,”
Doyel Joshi
Our only intervention was giving them pink saris. We left certain seats open for the audience so they might want to go and just sit, learn, talk, not talk, observe—whatever.
NGB: It was an exchange. It ended up being that lots of the women artisans and the urban crowd would sit with each other and talk for a very long time. People were also still observing, and it became a performance piece in itself—those interactions—which we really loved. And it became a living body that was up for three days. We managed to create a space that facilitated these differences in a way in which people really understand what they can connect on.
WW: It’s so interesting, though, that in that one choice of one color, you make a huge impact in your work.
NGB: It’s really working from a context, understanding how we feel in a given space and time and then looking at what the existing narrative is, and seeing how we can translate that or transfer that into an emotion.
DJ: We always talk about freedom. I think that’s just very central. Creative people are somehow always in search of freedom. That’s the job. But there’s something really enjoyable about breaking patterns or existing formats.
“Creative people are somehow always in search of freedom,”
Doyel Joshi
NGB: Asking, can we open this up again? What’s going on there? That’s inspiring.
Cinematic Performances and Projects
How Are You Feeling Studio, “Into the Pinke,” photo by Black Sheep Media, courtesy of the artist.
WW: You recently held the performance and project Into the Pinke for a Land Art Festival in Ladakh—placing people in a landscape that was so cinematic, again in one single color of pink. What was the context there?
NGB: What was important to us was to say, if we’re a project in the land, and if we’re doing it in Ladakh in the north of India in the mountains, we had to ask, what is the land communicating? And as humans, naturally, we best understand other humans. So we would need to understand what locals in the land are saying about the land. And we saw they find in rituals, in movement and dance, religious practices, costumes what the land communicates. So that became the starting point.
“We had to ask, what is the land communicating?”
Neil Ghose Balser
The organizers facilitated conversations across the board with cultural organizations, with schools, and we worked with 50 students from a local school. We did three days of workshops with them and we told them about what we feel and where we come from and what we can learn from the spaces that we inhabit. They showed us different dances that they did, games they played.
DJ: We noticed the small things, like the ease with which they moved in the land. The moment we saw them in the land, they were one with it. We realized we were the aliens in it.
NGB: Rather than bringing something into the land or looking at the materiality that’s in the land, we want to work with people in a performance language with bodies. We asked, “What do you feel like doing?” And then, at the end of our sessions, they always played musical chairs. And the dances performed while playing musical chairs were the traditional dances of the land. So we said, we’re going to take this because they love it and put it in the land. They could do their own thing.
DJ: We have to be very mindful, because all our conditioning can kind of prevent us from accessing what we need to access. The landscape did the work, the people did the work, the kids did the work. As creators of the work, we have a responsibility. As curators of the work, there is a responsibility. As the audience, there’s a responsibility. Freedom is not free. Freedom comes with a lot of responsibility.
“Freedom comes with a lot of responsibility,”
Doyel Joshi
WW: And just that question of, “How are you feeling?” We’re afraid to say honestly how things make us feel. Especially in the art world. We don’t want to be wrong. But you can’t be right or wrong with how you feel from seeing something.
DJ: And that’s the premise of our relationship too, because the moment you’ve asked that question and the moment you’ve had the courage, and you feel safe to answer that question, you can then enter together to explore why you think the way you do think and open to change.
Pond Room; Courtesy of How Are You Feeling Studio.
Wedding Vernissage; Courtesy of How Are You Feeling Studio.
