Between Realms and Dreams, Along Reality’s Edge, a solo exhibition of acclaimed multi- disciplinary artist, poet, and dreamer Seema Kohli (b. 1960), brings together key bodies of work in diverse media, encompassing works on paper, paintings, sculptures, installation, moving-image, etchings, textiles, photography, serigraphs and manifestations as prints that form Kohli’s rigorous practice.
Swaying between the vivid, emotional, and surreal flights of, and in-between alternate universes, the exhibition, Between Realms and Dreams, Along Reality’s Edge, showcases a will to break free from self-contained planes of existence, concurrent with one’s own. Some of the oldest cultures and accounted pieces of literature have revealed parallel worlds that transpose conquests, where protagonists seek, explore or conquer. On one hand there is the Persian text of ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, a tale narrated by Yamlikha, the serpent queen, to Hasib Karim al-Din after he enters her realm. A disquisition of search, discovery and feat as it speaks of proponent, Buluqiya, who leaves for a voyage to sift through seven islands, before he returns home to be king. On the other hand, the western, Norse mythology contests ‘ordinary’ land to the land of ‘Alfheim’, an otherworldly home to elves, fairies and other folkloric creatures. There is also the Japanese concept of ‘Isekai’, of which the earliest traces can be found in the tales of ‘Urashima Tarō’. With a bi-focal tradition, the stories may be divided into the protagonist either “transitioning into another world” or “reincarnating into another world”. Several other records may be found, with claims of being fact or fiction — where there is a walk through a mirror to a strange new world, crossing oceans to reach unknown waters as well as myths and legends that express infinite universes, each with its own gods. Till date, the most notable physicists and researchers debate its faculty. The idea, first put forward by Max Plank in the 1900s, resulted in the possibilities of deeper laws at work. A doctoral candidate at Princeton University, Hugh Everett, sought an evolutionary system to show there may be parallel worlds that exist with our own, comparing the scenario to branches of a tree. The works as part of the exhibit, Between Realms and Dreams, Along Reality’s Edge, are unconcerned about the matter of fact. The artist rather, poetically clutches and caresses free rein, taking autonomy to gracefully unfurl shackles.
As one goes through the exhibition, narratives around the golden womb, which is the self- pervading source from which the entire cosmos emerges, are unveiled. There is a birthing that takes place. Birthing, which is not just of physicality but also of cerebral intuition and that of spirit. To consider a serigraph as part of the exhibition, titled Almost Everything Notes on Hope (2021), one can see the expansion of cognizance through knowledge. Inception hints at inquiry. One sees visual dialects of seeking, as they question identity, faith, norms, duties, teachings, to pivot, rivet, compare, morph to alter then assess and gauge a material existence. For instance, in the
presented set of 84 prints Ouroboros (2013), the artist uses physiognomy to portray an introspection, to pierce through an assigned self. The artist shape shifts from one form to another, moving in and out of skins, bones and attires. Identity and anatomy, at instances, also manifest themselves as a world of its own. The next stage is that of discovery, which is an equivalent of sprouting, blooming, flourishing. There is a gradual, timely anthesis of the self. An example is the acrylic and ink on canvas work with 24-carat gold and silver leaf, titled, Hiranyagarbha – Time, Space, Movement (2023). And finally, there is a flight. An act of emancipation, which can be seen through multiple works including, Altered reality (2023), Narratives & Songs of Hiranyagarbha of Riding of Winds (2023) and Flight Within (2023). This is a flight of liberation, where whims are set free. There are fractures that blur confines between realms, dreams and reality.