Seema Kohli sits still, translating her vision on to canvas, but it is her installation film on movement and the mind that won her a gold at the Florence Biennale recently.
I have always been a dreamer,” says Seema Kohli, artist, whose deeply spiritual works are sometimes cited as the “next blue chip” investments in the now recovering world of contemporary Indian art. If you’ve been following them, you would, of course, recognise the abiding theme of these works: The Hiranyagarbha, or the mythic golden womb from which all life springs, mentioned in the Yajur Veda. Motifs, banyan roots, lotuses, women and goddesses… the painfully delineated sketches on Kohli’s canvases all hark back to the same theme.
Poised over one of her larger works, sketching — pen and ink are still her best friends, even more than colour — for eight to 10 hours a day, Kohli is afraid to move, lest her reverie be broken and the vision that has loomed up before her fades away.
“I am afraid to move for even a simple task as filling ink in my pen,” she smiles, “even when the ink is just within my reach... so, I call out to my children, ‘Please, pass me some ink.’” It’s a captivating portrait of an artist at work. Ironically though, the meditative artist, so contemplative in her stillness, has movement on her mind. Her film, after all, on ‘myth, mind and movement’ just won gold at the seventh edition of the Florence Biennale of Contemporary Art, a prestigious event that attracts luminaries and strugglers alike and at which cultural czars from round the world gather every two years, in Michelangelo’s city.
The last time an Indian got thus awarded, it was Yusuf Arrakal for his paintings. But Kohli’s win is significant because it comes not just at an important juncture in her career — “when finally everyone has begun to accept me for what I am, allowing me to be myself… I am so grateful for that” — but because she has won it for a category as yet ‘emerging’ in India: the installation film.
While contemporary artists in India are increasingly pushing the envelope, whether it be through installations in the midst of consumer frenzy in shopping malls, cranes holding up dead trees, or ‘babies’ being bathed in the Yamuna (and we won’t even mention ‘bartan boy’ Subodh Gupta, who does so well internationally with his mammoth sculptures), many of these are as yet niche categories with the nascent art market viewing them a little uncomfortably. Creative, yes, self indulgent, may be, but will the collectors come calling?
For Kohli, though, whose canvases are bestsellers, it was important to experiment with film. “There were so many times while painting when I wished for a three-dimensional medium,” she says. The idea for Swayamsiddha — Myth, Mind and Movement, in fact, came as early as 12 years ago, in 1996, when Kohli, after a trip to Rishikesh, started exploring the very theme of the Hiranyagarbha for the first time.
“I was sitting by the Ganga on a rock and kept seeing cavities made in the sand where the water had receded. It reminded me of a womb. The quietude and solace I felt were very powerful. I felt so secure, it was a mystical experience,” she remembers. Soon after, Kohli’s mother passed away and during the ceremony that followed — the family was Arya Samaji, not given to too many rituals — she was introduced to the all-important mantra of the Yajur Veda talking of the golden womb, of creation, of destruction and death, which is seen as merely change and the start of another cycle of creation, according to Vedic philosophy. “Since it was talking of movement, of change, a film was very much on my mind. It is only that it got formalised now and I was ready to deliver my experience in this format,” she says.
Both the film and the sculptural installation (Swayamsiddha, the ‘self-realised’) that Kohli unveiled are intensely personal and talk about her own experiences. Over “endless cups of tea”, Kohli discussed the concept of the film with Teamwork Films’ CEO Sanjoy Roy. Finally, free dance movements were used to express the concept of time, of Kali (or ‘kaal’, or ‘time’), a figure that is very close to Kohli’s very being, the exultant, empowered figure of the goddess symbolising, for the artist, the total absorption and joy of a yogic Samadhi. The dance movements were interspersed with the artist’s own works on the theme down the years.
Brought up in a family that was deeply spiritual, though not religious, Kohli still begins her day with verses from the Sikh texts (introduced to her by her spiritual guru, who happens to be a Sikh), meditates, and reads Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. It’s a deeply rooted way of being. So is her art. And yet, the theme could be universal. “When we displayed in Italy and in Spain (the film was selected for the Arco festival and shown at the Gabron museum)”, she says, “I was really surprised at the response.” People, strangers, would come up to her to talk about life and death. And the business of creating. Which is, in the end, something that binds us all.
