When 'yoginis' hold court

Seema Kohli's exhibition, A Circle of Our Own, is an intriguing experiment with installations in a public space

On a winter morning at Sunder Nursery, adjacent to Humayun’s Tomb in New Delhi, the mist is rising slowly off the dew-laden lawns. Surrounding a pool of pink lilies, a group of stone-carved yoginis keep vigil over the excavated 16th-Century pond. Made from soft, salmon coloured stone by traditional stone-carvers in Odisha, the sculptures have been shaped to artist Seema Kohli’s requirements using conventional iconography for most part, but also creating “new” yoginis per her request: “To me, a yogini is any manifestation of energy,” the artist says, “all living beings are yoginis.” That explains their unorthodox names, as also some of the forms that one recognises for being in Kohli’s familiar style, bringing to the traditional stone sculpture a renewed sense of creativity.

Kohli’s exhibition, A Circle of Our Own, is an intriguing experiment with installations in a public space. Many would argue that sculpture belongs where thousands of visitors can view and engage with it daily — and they would be right. The idea of yoginis has been central to Kohli’s belief for a long while, something she has explored by visiting ancient yogini sites in Madhya Pradesh and Odisha and undertaking extraordinary oblations to experience their auras. Her undertakings are not religious as much as curious, a wonder at the mystery of creation that nature endows in womanhood, making them simultaneously sacred and mysterious. She theorises that an onset of patriarchy eroded the centrality of women’s roles in society in the medieval ages, slowly denigrating and then relegating them to the margins. By focussing on the feminine divine, she hopes to start a conversation and reclaim the rightful space for women.

Seema Kohli

Kohli’s pursuit of yoginis is hardly new, the figure familiar to the artist’s viewers in her paintings and sculptures — as often the subject of her work, as in the margins around the central character. At Sunder Nursery, 64 zinc etching plates used for printmaking are displayed in vitrines, each bearing the imprint of a different yogini. But the artist does not confine herself to any canonical number for the yoginis, preferring to show them as part of a continuous, unbroken link between the past, the present and the future. “We are our past,” she explains, “and there can be no future without the present.”

Away from the pond, under a spreading peepul tree, Kohli has placed bronze sculptures recalling her distinctive trope of the “tattooed body” as evident in the markings over the figures of the yoginis — whether Sohamsa in which a woman merges with the swan she embraces as an expression of her liberation; or Tree of Life, which has been commissioned by the Supreme Court of India as a 20-ft sculpture to be installed in a specially created pool of water in its new premises. Nagabandha, a serpent yogini, its sinuous body almost impossibly twined, demands to be seen as much for its complexity as for the artist’s evocation of the interdependence of humanity and nature.

Commanding the space is a 10.5-ft high Kalika carved from wood by Odia artisans to Kohli’s specifications. Represented like a primal goddess with twirling vines, her body epitomises nature’s bounty and lushness, a territory for exploring the intimate bond that exists between the divine and the terrestrial, between worlds known and unknown, of which we are a part. “You cannot have contemporary art without conceding that which has gone before,” Kohli insists, seeking to establish a language that engages with previous traditions that have been unfortunately erased from the canons of current practice thanks to a colonial legacy. In bringing the conversation back, Kohli’s yoginis are hoping to kick-start the dialogue from their current court at Sunder Nursery.
 

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated