Past Lives

As a young girl, multidisciplinary artist Seema Kohli was afraid of birds, finding their frequent and unobstructed disappearance into the vast sky unnerving. Now, believing them to be kindred spirits, she fondly recalls the name given to her by her father, KD Kohli, ‘Shaheen’ (‘hawk’ in Urdu). “My father encouraged us to look up at the infinite sky, just as birds do. As a young boy growing up in a village in undivided Punjab, the open sky presented limitless possibilities to him. This spirit was most evident when his family came across the border as refugees in 1947. They were mostly empty handed, and their future was uncertain, yet they had hope in their heart to build something new.” Kohli’s latest solo show Khula Aasman pays homage to this unbound spirit and her father’s roots in the village of Pind Dadan Khan, currently in the Jhelum District of Pakistan.

Presented on the heels of her 2019 show Project Home: The Word for the World is Home, Khula Aasman expands on the theme of nostalgia for a homeland beyond her reach. Through the medium of mixed media works it delves deep into family lore, material inheritance and reconstructed memories. It is spread across two venues—the Dara Shikoh Library at Ambedkar University which houses the Partition Museum of Delhi and her eponymous gallery in Okhla. The exhibit is also part of the India Art Fair Parallel programming.

On display are paintings, lithographs, silver gelatin prints, installations and films. Throughout the month-long display, there will also be performances, book readings, panel discussions and workshops focussing on the preservation of material memories in light of forced migrations. While the Partition Museum displays one of the films and is the venue for the workshops, most of the artworks are on display in Kohli’s new studio in Okhla.

Kohli’s father’s autobiography Mitr Pyare Noo is the primary inspiration and source material for Khula Aasman. Once he was no longer physically able to recount his memories, she turned his words into fodder for imagination. The book, written in Hindi, was 10 years in the making and contains detailed memories of a land left behind and times gone by. In his words, “Memories are seamless and borderless. The native in you and me resides in the homeland of memories that cannot be partitioned. You may be in any corner of the world, but your identity remains rooted in the earth of your native land. It shapes and casts your personality.”

Kohli dips into geographical and cultural recollections from the book and presents romanticised versions of them in the form of paintings and mixed media installations. Her larger canvasses include Madhumalti, which recreates the eponymous red flowers of her parents’ youth, replete with fluttering birds and buzzing bees; And I Hear You with my Eyes Closed and Khula Aasman bring alive the mountainous terrain of her ancestral land. In The Flutter of Her Wings and the Unbending Mountains birds are embroidered with recycled plastic yarn. The avian motif is particularly strong in Bright the Hawk’s Flight on the Empty Sky where a hawk glides across the night sky in a spectacular display of power.

Another recurring element is the rose, a flower that holds significance for its scent and healing properties. In Gulab ke Khet she depicts the famous rose fields of Choa Saidan Shah, which one would cross on camelback while undertaking a pilgrimage from Pind Dadan Khan to the temples of Katas Raj. Their scent would greet weary travellers from a distance.

“Like this pilgrimage, various journeys are captured within this exhibition,” explains Adwait, who has curated the show. Apart from the migration of Kohli’s family across a newly inked border from Pind Dadan Khan through Shimla to Delhi, there is also the journey of plants and herbs which the family travelled with, as part of her hakim grandfather’s professional medicinal kit. “These plants brought our attention to the kind of stories that only nature can communicate. They offer their own descriptions of the journeys taken alongside the human actors with whom they travel,” says the curator.

There are also the journeys that could not be completed, as that of Kohli’s uncle Daku and the family cow Yamuna, both of whom are captured together in a happy lithograph. On a similar vein, Kohli pays homage to those who lost their lives to honour killings in her film Komorebi: The Door Doesn’t Hold Back.

Every journey is explored in unique ways and sometimes different journeys are brought together creatively, as visible in the silver gelatin prints. Here, photographs taken by her father in later years are meshed with others showcasing the land he left behind. This innovation was made possible through the help of Kohli’s friend from across the border, Maria Waseem, who sent images of Pind Dadan Khan and the area surrounding it in 2018. So, one sees Kohli’s father’s wedding procession from the 1950s viewed from atop an arch belonging to a Shiv temple in the village. The scene is collaged and hand painted using Fuji Colors acquired by her father years ago.

She also brings the past and present together through installations and performance art. An example of the former is Reminiscences of Khewra, which highlights the importance of rock salt, a prevalent natural feature of the area, by recreating a bed of rocks on which rest quotidian items like household vessels and containers. Another immersive and transportational experience was offered on the evening of the launch, when culinary items were served based on Kohli’s grandfather’s medicinal recipes known as “Hakim Sahib ke nuske” like seb ka murabba and gulkand.

Further inspired by her grandfather’s practice is the Dawakhana, which takes up most of the basement in her studio. At the heart of this display are the beautiful gold leaf drawings on Somerset paper titled ‘Herbs of Inheritance’. These are detailed recreations of the pages of Hakim Chunni Lal Kohli’s Hikmat books. Though their original instructions were in Urdu—a language Kohli isn’t familiar with—she has recreated them in their exactitude. The Appendix to the book is in English and its recreation takes up an entire wall. As the Unani doctor also prescribed foods for holistic wellbeing, jars filled with different concoctions are laid out for the audience to smell and identify.

“Dawakhana is an invitation to think about the migratory aspect of medical knowledge, the struggles of indigenous medical systems, and most importantly the idea of a clinic that went far beyond diagnosis and prescription. Hikmat was a way of life more than it was a profession,” shares anthropologist Ishita Dey, who helped Kohli curate this particular section. Dey points to an interesting aspect that came to light during her study of the subject material—the invisible role played by the women and children of the house. They would cook the food to be served to patients, roll up the prescriptive herbs into ‘pudis’, and care for the ailing. Yet their labour went unacknowledged in keeping with the social norms of the time.

Kohli, however, pays homage to women and their stories through a large phulkari tapestry titled The Bird Song. Made in collaboration with the Baba Mehr Singh Charitable Trust from Bassi Pathan, it symbolises the act of women collectively sitting in the afternoon sun and embroidering fabrics to be squirrelled away for the trousseaux of young family members. Kohli explains, “This is an integral part of the memory of my family members, something I had grown up hearing from my Bimla bua. In fact, it was important for all the women in society at the time.”

The relationship of memories with the present is also explored through film. On display at the Partition Museum and the studio is the film Mirroring the Past. This double wall projection stitches the past and present together by using stills of her father’s family home, his school and the train station of Pind Dadan Khan, in conjunction with footage of the doors and windows of her own studio in the present day. Sounds related to Hikmat, like the pounding of the Hamam Dasta to crush the herbs for medicine, are effectively inserted as ambient noise.

When asked why she felt the need to create these works, she responds: “Sometimes I look back and I see memory being replayed on loop and new memories being created from that memory. Every moment that we live seems new, but it is always a recycled past. This is why I felt the urgency to create these visuals. I don’t deny that Delhi is my home, but I carry parts of my ancestral land in my DNA. It is believed that nostalgia is sometimes more beautiful than reality. I invite you to see this past from my eyes, so it does become more beautiful.”

(Khula Aasman, by Seema Kohli, is on display at the Partition Museum at Dara Shikoh Library, Ambedkar University till February 15; and at Seema Kohli Studio, Okhla Phase II, Delhi, till February 18)

 

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