Seema Kohli’s Newest Solo Show
Curated by Adwait, Seema Kohli is set to present a new solo, Khula Aasman. The show is set to premiere at the Partition Museum at Dara Shikoh Library, Ambedkar University from 16 January to 15 February 2025. The show can also be seen at Seema Kohli Studio, Okhla Phase II from 18 January to 18 February 2025.
Where is Khula Aasman About?
In this second edition of her ongoing project, Seema Kohli continues to exhume her family archives, material inheritance and oral accounts to recreate the memory of her ancestral home in Pind Dadan Khan. The town, presently a part of Jhelum District in Pakistan, lies tantalisingly beyond her reach. Articulating a tenuous link to a home that one may never return to, this deeply personal project, nonetheless, reveals the ephemerality of all belonging.
Lithograph,Hanco Ink on 250gsm Somerset paper, 13.5×20.5 in
Courtesy – Seema Kohli Studio
A Fragment of Seema Kohli’s Memory
The title Khula Aasman evokes the illusory yet transcendental horizon that witnesses our labours and guides our dreams. It recalls an exchange that Seema Kohli, a young girl at the time, had with her father in their New Rajinder Nagar home where the family eventually came to settle after the Partition. ‘What do you see ahead?’ the father would quiz his daughter to which she’d naively respond ‘Babbi ka ghar’ pointing to her friend’s home. ‘And what do you see after that?’ the line of enquiry continued, nudging her imagination forward to the sinuous infinity where the sky and the land dissolved into each other. Khula Aasman thus upholds the meagre yet momentous hope treasured by a dispossessed heart.
What to See At Khula Aasman?
Spread across the two venues of Dara Shikoh Library at Ambedkar University and Seema Kohli Studio in Okhla, Khula Aasman comprises a range of mixed-media works.
Acrylic, watercolours and inks on 360gsm paper, 4×5 ft
Courtesy – Seema Kohli Studio
A multichannel video installation ‘अक्स-ए-गुज़ि शता’ (Mirroring the Past) suspends a bridge of longing between homes new and old, stitching the two geographies together, albeit imperfectly. In reenacting the tortuous journey from Pind Dadan Khan to New Delhi, the artist extends herself back in time like air rushing to fill a vacuum, or life pushing its tendrils through dilapidation.
The camera hungrily caresses the facade of Bada Ghar (the family home in Pind Dadan Khan) savouring every detail before sweeping through the mohalla, strangely familiar. Doors and windows of Seema Kohli’s current studio suddenly open onto distant galis, welcoming the hanging wooden balcony and the latticed arches like a long-lost sibling. The reconstruction of memory continues in a series of silver gelatin prints that have been developed from a selection of family photographs.
Mix media on recycled plastic yarn, 5×5 ft
Courtesy – Seema Kohli Studio
In drawing over and tinting these photographic prints with Fuji Colours acquired by her father in 1957 the artist seeks to reacquaint herself with these derelict spaces, painstakingly populating them with inhabitants, memories and events. These fragmented memories traced over the photographic surface are enfleshed further with the aid of audio excerpts from her father Shri KD Kholi’s autobiography Mitr Pyare Noo, a key resource for this project.
One of the two large paintings included in the exhibition, Yamuna, is an ode to the relationship between Seema Kohli’s father and the eponymous cow, who had to be left behind when the family migrated to India, a loss that haunted her father even unto his latter years. The other, Gulab ke Khet opens a vista onto the sprawling rose fields of Choa Saidanshah that were crossed on camelbacks on pilgrimage to the nearby shrines of Katasraj. The gulkand confected from these roses was a common yet satiating accompaniment to the basi roti that the pilgrims consumed during such journeys. Its health benefits were extolled by the artist’s grandfather Hakim Chunn Lal Kohli, an eighteenth-generation practitioner of Unani medicine.
Hand painted with Fuji photo color on silvergeletin print on Fomapan Baryta based bromide paper 280gsm toned with selenium, 16×20 in
Courtesy – Seema Kohli Studio
The fragrant memories of this family occupation have come down to the artist in a script she can no longer decipher and re-live through a series of drawings. These drawings paint a picture of a home that doubled up as a 24/7 clinic where the boundaries between the private and the professional blurred as children and other family members were drawn into sourcing, preparing, and packaging remedies, triage and care of the patients. The Himalayan foothills nearby provided a steady supply of various herbs prescribed by Hikmat.
A four-by-ten phulkari created in collaboration with the women’s collective Meher Baba Charitable Trust in Bassi Pathan (Punjab) renders the Seema Kohli’s ancestral landscapes of the Salt Range arrayed along the banks of Jhelum in its quintessential bagh pattern. Growing up, the artist heard stories from her bua about the unique space held by this collective women’s enterprise within the cultural and everyday life of Punjab. Through multisensory bricolages of material like these Khula Asman seeks to stir the diaspora of memories that resides in all of us.
Acrylic colors and ink on canvas with 24ct gold and silver leaf, 6×6 ft
Courtesy – Seema Kohli Studio
Image – Khula Aasman (2024), Acrylic and water colors on arches, 300gsm, cold press paper, 10.2×14 in. Courtesy – Seema Kohli Studio
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