Where Earth Writes Upon the Sky

1 December – 28 December 2025
Lalit Kala Akademi, Chennai
Presented by Gallery Veda
Curated by Shaunak Mahbubani

Where Earth Writes Upon the Sky was a month-long solo exhibition presented at Lalit Kala Akademi, Chennai, from 1 to 28 December 2025. Curated by Shaunak Mahbubani, the exhibition brought together a significant body of work exploring the feminine through memory, lived experience, and storytelling.

The title was inspired by Khalil Gibran’s evocative line, “Trees are poems that the Earth writes upon the sky,” which served as a conceptual anchor for the exhibition. The works on view reflected on continuity, renewal, and the dynamic dialogue between inner and outer worlds.

The exhibition featured paintings, sculptures, video, performance, and installations, offering audiences an expansive view of Kohli’s evolving practice across mediums. Presented in Chennai at Lalit Kala Akademi, the show brought together different phases of her artistic journey within a single space, allowing viewers to trace the continuity of ideas that have shaped her work over the years.

Kohli’s practice has long engaged with mythic narratives, symbolic figures, and the idea of the sacred feminine. Through layered surfaces, flowing forms, and recurring motifs, her works weave together memory, desire, belief, and imagination. Many pieces in the exhibition drew from natural elements — trees, animals, and cosmic forms — reflecting her sustained engagement with ecological thought and spiritual ecofeminism. Across mediums, these elements invited viewers into contemplative encounters with the themes that continue to animate her practice.

The exhibition also marked a significant presentation of her work in Chennai — her first large-scale showing at Lalit Kala Akademi in the city. It included sculptures, works on paper, canvases, and a special emphasis on thread and embellishment works on raw, untreated canvas. The transition of imagery across paper, canvas, thread, and sculptural form revealed the material evolution of her ideas.

Curator Shaunak Mahbubani described the exhibition as part of an ongoing curatorial dialogue with the artist since 2019. Drawing from Gibran’s metaphor of trees as poems written by the earth upon the sky, he observed that Kohli’s work explores the poetic charge generated at the meeting of dualities — above and below, within and without, sun and moon, earth and sky — a resonance that felt especially pertinent in contemporary times.