Project Home: The Word for the World is Home

Curated by Adwait Singh
Kolkata Centre for Creativity, Kolkata, 2019

Presented in 2019 at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity, Project Home: The Word for the World is 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.

Curated by Adwait Singh, the exhibition situated Kohli’s personal history within broader contemporary discourses around migration, borders, and identity. The project emerged from her 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. Through this intimate archive, Kohli transformed private memory into a shared spatial experience.

At the core of the exhibition was a 40-minute multidisciplinary performance titled Retracing Paradise. The performance interwove recitations from Mitr Pyaare Nu, projections of archival maps — including 19th-century colonial cartographies — family photographs, Tholpavakoothu leather puppetry, movement, and layered soundscapes composed of recorded oral histories. The work juxtaposed body, archive, and geography to evoke nostalgia, rupture, and endurance.

The exhibition extended beyond performance into a carefully constructed mnemonic landscape. Large-scale reverse paintings (2017–2019) layered colonial maps, refugee portraits, birds in migration, and celestial imagery across multiple acrylic surfaces. These works suggested that borders are first imagined before they are drawn, and that sky and memory resist territorial containment.

A significant body of drawings reinterpreted anatomical diagrams and calligraphy from century-old Yunani medical manuscripts belonging to Kohli’s grandfather, Hakim Chunni Lal Kohli. Executed in ink and pencil, these works mourned the interruption of an eight-generation lineage of healing practice displaced by Partition.

An installation of medicinal herbs, glass jars, Unani tinctures, and a wooden cabinet recreated the sensory environment of her ancestral home, once a 24-hour clinic in Pind Dadan Khan. Sourced from Delhi’s Khari Bauli market, the herbs reactivated memory through scent and material presence. Brass utensils painted with herbal motifs further connected domestic ritual to generational knowledge.

Archival family photographs, annotated directly on the gallery walls in pencil, transformed intimate remembrance into public testimony. A continuous ambient soundscape of songs, domestic echoes, and recorded conversations enveloped the space, while leather puppets lingered as sculptural traces of migration, casting elongated shadows that animated the gallery.

Project Home functioned as an experiential archive — a space where inheritance was neither nostalgic nor static, but lived and negotiated. Invoking the philosophical ideal of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — the world as one family — the exhibition proposed that while territories may fracture, memory remains indivisible.

Through layered materiality and embodied storytelling, Kohli articulated home not as geography, but as a continuum of shared human experience.