Project Home: The Word for the World is Home
(Retracing Paradise)
Curated by Adwait Singh
Kolkata Centre for Creativity, Kolkata
2019
Presented in 2019 at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity, Project Home unfolded as a deeply immersive and research-driven exhibition that brought together performance, archival reconstruction, painting, installation, sound, and text. Conceived as both memorial and meditation, the project examined displacement, inheritance, and the fragile architecture of belonging.
The project emerged from Kohli’s engagement with her late father Krishnan Dev Kohli’s autobiography Mitr Pyaare Nu, which chronicled her family’s forced migration from Pind Dadan Khan during the Partition of India.
At the core of the exhibition was a 40-minute multidisciplinary performance titled Retracing Paradise, interwoven with recitations, archival maps, family photographs, Tholpavakoothu leather puppetry, movement, and layered soundscapes.
Large-scale reverse paintings (2017–2019) layered colonial maps, refugee portraits, birds in migration, and celestial imagery. An installation of medicinal herbs, glass jars, Unani tinctures, and a wooden cabinet recreated the sensory environment of her ancestral home in Pind Dadan Khan.
Invoking Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — the world as one family — the exhibition proposed that while territories may fracture, memory remains indivisible.