Fold / Unfold

Through a recently-concluded solo exhibition, artist Sonia Khurana explores the motifs of interiority and embodiment, and gathers several ‘vignettes across time that place the body in an oblique relation to diffused feminist aesthetics of the counter-spectacle and performative resistance’

- Kaiwan Mehta

A woman performing some kind of movements within a space that appears to be a sort of closed room — movements that resemble acrobatics, and dance, and a physical training drill, often in a Charlie Chaplin-esque mode, was my first introduction to the work of Delhi-based artist Sonia Khurana. As much as one could realise the attention this work drew to the sense of the human body — especially that of the woman — the sense of aesthetics or beauty, or freedom of movement (or not) attached to it; one also realised the confines of a box-space that the performance indexed. The work’s reference to a bird cage with a bird was striking. Two of her more recent works that struck a chord and even today remain etched as strong images are, first, of a woman sleeping in a public square, with pigeons grouping and moving all around her, but the sleeping body is hardly disturbed; and second, of a determined woman carrying a flower pot across a city and its streets, walking away as if on some secret mission of delivery or message. And then one was struck to see Khurana occupy a house in Delhi, abandoned by human habitation and slated for demolition, where then objects and images brought in a new habitation and civilisation to this ‘oneiric house’.