Bodies of Earth, Bodies of Sky

Bodies of Sky, Bodies of Earth was a solo exhibition by Seema Kohli that emerged from the conceptual and material rigor of her practice. The exhibition’s spatial and scenographic structure developed through close engagement with Kohli’s sustained inquiry into matter as simultaneously physical, metaphysical, and philosophical. Rather than functioning as a narrative imposed upon the work, the exhibition expanded the internal logic of her practice into space, allowing material processes to shape both form and experience.

18 January – 25 January 2026
Shridharani Gallery, Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi
Presented by Gallerie Nvya
Curated by Satyajit Dave

Kohli’s work was grounded in an understanding of matter as active and generative. Clay, wood, paper, metal, pigment, and light were treated not as inert substances but as sites of transformation that registered time, touch, and resistance. This position aligned her practice with materialist and post-phenomenological thinking, in which matter was understood as relational and dynamic, embodied and reciprocal rather than passive. The works retained visible traces of their making, treating process as knowledge and material as a site of memory, imagination, and transformation.

The exhibition unfolded as a conceptual passage that reflected Kohli’s long-standing engagement with the body as a locus of experience. Its arc moved from the idea of origin or womb, through the conditions of earth and embodied life, toward sky, release, and shedding, with moksha functioning as an orienting horizon. This progression was articulated materially rather than symbolically, echoing philosophical traditions in which transcendence was understood not as a departure from matter, but as transformation through it.

At the entrance, a large-scale gilded work established the condition of origin. Gold and silver leaf were treated materially, functioning as fragile skins responsive to pressure, heat, and handling. Variations in surface and sheen made visible the labor of application. While recalling devotional material traditions from South Asia, the work also resonated with modernist and post-minimal investigations of surface and material presence, from Yves Klein’s use of gold to the tactile immediacy of Arte Povera.

Terracotta works formed the exhibition’s grounding core. Shaped through compression and fire, they retained the imprint of the hand and resisted refinement. Appearing as fragments, markers, or vessels, they evoked archaeological and vernacular forms without settling into historical quotation. In this regard, Kohli’s sculptural language aligned with postwar ceramic and sculptural practices that foregrounded process and tactility, including the work of artists such as Lucie Rie, as well as contemporary practices that collapsed distinctions between object, body, and architecture.

Works on paper introduced a contrasting register of permeability and breath. Pigment entered the fibers through absorption and staining, producing surfaces sensitive to timing and restraint. These works registered vulnerability rather than mass, situating Kohli’s approach within phenomenological traditions of drawing and painting. They could be read through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception as embodied and reciprocal, where the visible was inseparable from the sensing body. Their emphasis on atmosphere and temporal change also recalled Gaston Bachelard’s writing on elemental matter and the poetics of air, as well as Indian philosophical traditions that understood breath as a bridge between material and subtle experience, from prāṇa in yogic thought to the Upanishadic sense of the life-force animating form.

Here, the sheet became a permeable field in which material and sensation co-produced the image, privileging process and embodiment over representation.

At the center of the exhibition, a monumental woodcut functioned as a hinge between earth and sky. The force required to carve the block remained visible in the printed surface, translating resistance into trace. The woodcut’s transformation of pressure into image aligned with phenomenological emphases on matter as process and becoming rather than fixed form, while its disciplined repetition and imprint evoked the Indian concept of saṁskāra, the residual impression left by action. Beyond this point, carved wooden forms reinforced with metal fittings introduced movement and lift, negotiating between organic growth and structural constraint. Their suspended tensions recalled sculptural lineages of balance and load, while conceptually they echoed Abhinavagupta’s account of vibration and emergence, where form was understood as a dynamic relation rather than a stable object.

Throughout Bodies of Sky, Bodies of Earth, matter operated across registers. It was physical in its weight and resistance, metaphysical in its capacity to hold memory and transformation, and philosophical in its insistence on relational becoming. The exhibition articulated moksha not as an escape from materiality, but as a process of shedding achieved through sustained attention to matter itself.

— Text by Satyajit Dave