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Enter Stillness | 2022

2022

Enter Stillness | 2022

Photos

Enter Stillness | 2022
Enter Stillness | 2022
Enter Stillness | 2022
Enter Stillness | 2022

About The Performance

Concept, Script & Direction: Seema Kohli
Photography & Videography: Sakthi Bhagat
Editor: Tariq Vasudeva
Music: Sahil Vasudeva
Animation: Gaurav Singh Bedi

“Seema Kohli’s Enter Stillness is a fable of two spaces inhabited, abandoned and dissolved. The work engages with the duality of the interior and the exterior, the forest and the studio, nature and art, liberation and confinement.


Draped in black and maroon shawl with flower-bedecked hair, Kohli saunters in the forest taking in the sounds, the smells and the colours. Several body rituals are performed: she touches the bark of the tree, shapes her hand in a heart and holds it close. She looks high and low and flaps her steady hands waiting to be propelled into a swift flight. Back in her studio, she swaps her brush for a sword. Detaching the sabre from the scabbard, she slices air and shaves off invisible cobwebs around her subconscious. She arches and bends over, her gaze affixed on the sword, sliding it forward and drawing it back. As Kohli wields the sword, it mimics the spine of the body that gives balance and equanimity to the body. The aviation of the body announces the movement of energy from the base of the spine towards the vertex and the awakening of the Kundalini.


Kohli’s acrobatic brandishing appears less a defensive operation against an invisible foe and more an attempt to symbolically cleave her own body in two, allotting them two different identities. As we watch her strike down like a warrior and fly like a majestic falcon, we realise we are not alone. Countless transfixed eyes envelop her to join in the act of gazing.


For Kohli, the sword is a metaphor for dissolving neat dualities. The weapon of violence may cut and dissect but it also connects the broken entities in a strong bind of mutual symbiosis. The space of liberation cannot exist without the space of oppressive labour. They comprise spaces born not of a collision but continuity.
Through her performance, Kohli foregrounds the body as the carrier of action, the mobiliser of change and the agent of birthing. Her work is a protest against the subservience of the body and its labour to the mind, and instead champions body rituals and body memory as crucial in the formation of self-identity and self-love.

Kohli invokes hands as symbols of action, a gesture of reaching out to the world and a desire to connect.
Created during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent severe lockdowns that imposed prolonged social hibernation, the work addresses the dark threads of isolation and elevated vulnerability amidst uncertainty that criss-crosses our social fabric today. Entering Stillness introspects the capricious human need to connect and simultaneously disengage and move between spaces inside and those outside. The performance accompanied by verses composed by the artist is Kohli’s visual panegyric on the interminable will to survive, nourish and sustain all planetary life.”
– Habiba Insaf, 2022

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