![]() Working with a discourse of power that is deliberately tangential, she structures the self through states of strangeness, alienation, displacement and embodiment. Her art practice attempts to draw critically on references to cultural and gendered identity, and the psycho-social domain. Sonia Khurana works primarily with lens- based media, and draws upon diverging practices: photo, video, and the moving image, performance, text, drawing, sound, music, voice, and installation. In a piece of text she wrote over several years, dormancy and vigilance are examined through sleeping/not sleeping. In the innermost section of this arrangement, the installation: ‘and the one does not stir without the other’ Sonia’s long-term interest in psychological interiority and subjectivity is morphed through voice, text and moving image, into a reflection on two states of the mind and body-psyche. In the text-based video, the movement of thought and language speak to both the processes of art and art’s action in public space, which is the space of encounter between the aesthetic and the political. The gravity and pathos of Logic of Birds one of its earliest iterations of the lying down project in Barcelona, makes way for the political potency of the speaking-with-the-body-action in lying down on the ground and the poetic turn of its recent modality of ‘lying down : ephemera’: a simulacrum of artist’s prone body as ‘residue’ reflective forms that spills out, to claim these spaces What we see is a traversal of artist’s prone body, from public spaces to the intimate interior, and the radical shift in axis from horizontal to vertical. She works on the axis of a speaking with as well as of the placing of herself as embodied subject in a sphere where it can become a transformative gesture. Through the performative mode, she engages with constant negotiations between body and language. Since the late nineties, Sonia has been exploring the poetic and political agency of ‘being’, navigating the overlapping boundary between the interior self and the outside world. Sonia Khurana’s second work in Kochi biennale, shown on the ground floor of the admin block, in Aspinwall, multi-channel installation: Body Event II, is a survey of a few of the iterations of her action of lying down, that has been performed in various spaces, and in different modalities around various cities, between 2006 to present. ![]() It is an enunciation of un-belonging and an assertion of post-colonial identity against the authority of Modernism, especially its sculpture tradition and use of the pedestal. Artist’s naked body perches on a pedestal, tries to take flight, but loses footing. ![]() Filmed on Hi 8, processed in the early days of digital image production, ‘bird’ was made while studying in London but first shown in Delhi, where its form and its transgressive use of the naked female body was brought to the scene of contemporary Indian art.īird is part ‘irreverent’, part hysterical and part abject. Khurana’s presentation at the Kochi Muziris Biennale juxtaposes her early Chaplinesque aspiration to flight in Bird, with vignettes from what she broadly terms: body event that traverse from flight, horizontality to finally, installing sleeping bodies on a vertical axis.īird, one of the two installation by Sonia khurana, on view at kochi muziris biennale, shown in Coir godown, in Aspinwall, is her most iconic video wok. Through what she calls ‘corporeal eloquence’, she draws our attention to the psychic life of the embodied subject. Khurana moves through the world’s spaces exploring her singular formulation of the melancholy of alienation and displacement, dereliction and abjection, space and time, memory and the body: a body that sings and dances, walks and lies down. Working with video, photography and performance, text and voice, her work is also a record of intimate gestures and actions in everyday life that would otherwise be lost in the slippages of accelerated time dictated by the logic of production and capital. Sonia Khurana’s work has broken new ground by placing the body in an oblique relation to feminist aesthetics of the counter-spectacle, performative resistance and exploratory self-articulation. ![]() Bird, and other body events: Sonia Khurana, supported by Kiran Nadar Museum of art ![]()
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