When the Moon is Nine Months Full

Solo show by Seema Kohli

Curated by Shaunak Mahbubani

Thursday, January 11 to Sunday, February 11

Incessant turning of hands. Feverish flurry of numbers. Where do we enter stillness?

Drawing from a deep practice of ongoing embodied research, renowned artist Seema Kohli foregrounds questions of time, labour, and movement in this new body of work. Deconstructing the hierarchy of the clock, the artist calls on us to lean in and imbibe the subliminal rhythms of our planet. The beating of hearts, phases of the moon, cycles of menstruation, flow of seasons sing forth from her vivid visions. These tellurian pulses foster connections between our bodies and the energies that move alongside, an antidote to the isolation of modern life. Adorned with mountains, stars, and trees, Kolhi's figures wear their interdependence as the full moon's light, a badge of love, of a kinship across species and materialities.

Wrapped up in Yourself, You hid from me.

All day i looked for You

and when i found You hiding inside me,

I ran wild, playing now me, now You.    — Lal Dĕd[1]

 Whirling in the syncretic teachings of Kashmiri mystic Lal Dĕd, Kohli is both disciple—in her own eyes—and beacon for us. In a pièce de résistance, she offers insight into Lal Arif's moment of ascension, occupying an unruly human body while communing with the unbound cosmos. It is this precious non-dual concurrency of Saivite and Sufi, corporeal and cosmic, multiple and whole, sea and seed that her works offer, so as to heal our fractured time.

The artist celebrates the labour of birthing, care, repair, resistance, and boycott undertaken by women for centuries, visualizing the adjacency between feminine and forest, of bodies relegated to reproduction, unrewarded and unrecognized under the regime of material productivity. In a poignant series, Kohli pays homage to this reciprocity through the trailblazing women of the Chipko movement (Gharwal Hills, 1970 onwards) deeply imprinted in her memory from when she was a child.

Turning her gaze towards the underbelly of gender and recognizing the shadow side of mythological representation, the artist leaps into new territory, birthing what Ursula Le Guin has termed,"her third self"[2]. Across the elements—wood, bronze, canvas—eagles and swans with wings outstretched accompany her flight, channeling courage and introspection respectively. In deftly conjoining her lineage of spiritual eco-feminism with a renewed hunger for equitable worlds, Seema Kolhi marks herself as a force that can neither be contained nor forgotten.

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[1] Ranjit Hoskote, I, LALLA The Poems of Lal Dĕd (Penguin Random House India, 2011)

[2] Ursula Le Guin, “The Space Crone”, in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (Grove Press, New York, 1989)