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British Museum, 2025

Museum

The Word for World is Home, 2019
The Word for World is Home, 2019
The Word for World is Home, 2020
The Word for World is Home, 2021
The Word for World is Home, 2022
The Word for World is Home, 2023
The Word for World is Home, 2024
The Word for World is Home, 2025
The Word for World is Home, 2026
The Word for World is Home, 2027
The Word for World is Home, 2028
The Word for World is Home, 2029

About The Collection

The British Museum, London holds significant works by Kohli within its permanent collection. In 2025, the Museum acquired The Word for the World is Home, a series of twelve anatomical drawings rooted in intergenerational memory and medicinal knowledge. Earlier, in 2022, it had acquired I Lalla – I, I Lalla – II, and Series-Narrative and Songs of Hiranyagarbha of Yogamaya.

The Word for the World is Home comprises twelve anatomical drawings accompanied by text reproduced from Kohli’s grandfather’s Yunani medicinal manuscripts. Although she did not read Urdu or Persian, the physical presence of the books — their stitching, scent, fragility, and age — became a site of intimate remembrance. Through drawing, she traced a lineage of healing that had once shaped her ancestral home.

The series was first presented as part of Project Home (2019) at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity and was later exhibited in Khula Aasman (2025) at Seema Kohli Studio, New Delhi. Emerging from her engagement with her father K. D. Kohli’s autobiography Mitr Pyare Nu, the broader project transformed family archives into a meditation on displacement, inheritance, and belonging.

The anatomical works extended this reflection — evoking a home that had also functioned as a clinic, where care, knowledge, and tenderness were inseparable. Through image and text, the drawings became vessels of embodied memory, mapping the fragile yet enduring transmission of wisdom across generations.

The inclusion of these works in the collection of The British Museum marks an important recognition of Kohli’s practice, situating deeply personal narratives of healing, migration, and ancestry within an international institutional context.

“I touch you Pitaji in the moth ridden books
Which I know you have yourself bound
Stitched it with your own hands
In the aged smell of the fragmented words
Of the language you spoke, you wrote
I hear the words evaporating
In the stories of the disintegrating faded photos
Trying to pull out a few spoken words
I try to snatch a few voices
Grab them by their form
Drawing from the drawings some meaning
Of inheritance warmth of yesteryears”

-Seema Kohli

EXHIBITIONS
  • ALL
  • CANVAS —
  • ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
  • ARCHIVAL PRINT
  • DRAWING
  • OIL ON CANVAS
  • PAINTING ON WOOD
  • PAPERWORKS —
  • ARCHIVAL PHOTOGRAPHIC WORKS / DRAWINGS
  • ETCHING
  • LITHOGRAPHS
  • PAINTINGS
  • SERIGRAPHS
  • WOODCUT
  • ZINC PLATE INTAGLIO PRINT
  • SCULPTURES —
  • BRONZE
  • GLASS-REINFORCED POLYMER
  • PAINTINGS
  • SANDSTONE
  • TERRACOTTA
  • WOODEN
  • THREADWORKS —
  • CLOTH
  • EMBROIDERY
  • WOODWORKS —
  • ACRYLIC ON WOOD
  • ALL
  • CANVAS —
  • ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
  • ARCHIVAL PRINT
  • DRAWING
  • OIL ON CANVAS
  • PAINTING ON WOOD
  • PAPERWORKS —
  • ARCHIVAL PHOTOGRAPHIC WORKS / DRAWINGS
  • ETCHING
  • LITHOGRAPHS
  • PAINTINGS
  • SERIGRAPHS
  • WOODCUT
  • ZINC PLATE INTAGLIO PRINT
  • SCULPTURES —
  • BRONZE
  • GLASS-REINFORCED POLYMER
  • PAINTINGS
  • SANDSTONE
  • TERRACOTTA
  • WOODEN
  • THREADWORKS —
  • CLOTH
  • EMBROIDERY
  • WOODWORKS —
  • ACRYLIC ON WOOD
  • ALL
  • ART FAIR/ BIENNALES
  • CANVAS
Bodies of Work
  • ALL
  • HERBS OF INHERITANCE
  • KHULA AASMAN
  • MOON MYTHS
  • SAPTA MATRIKA
  • SHAKTI
  • TANTRA
  • THE GOLDEN WOMB SERIES
  • TREE OF LIFE
  • YOGINIS
  • ALL
  • ARTICLES
  • EXHIBITIONS
  • PAINTINGS
  • PERFORMANCES