Utensil Painting
Sculptures, Paintings
Seema Kohli
Seema Kohli
Project Home: The Word for the World is Home
(Retracing Paradise)
Curated by Adwait Singh
Kolkata Centre for Creativity, Kolkata
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.
Sculptures, Paintings
Threadworks, Cloth
Paperworks, Paintings
Paperworks, Paintings
Canvas, Drawing
Canvas, Drawing
Canvas, Drawing
Concept & Direction: Seema KohliCinematography Edit & Sound: Sakthi Doss A 12 minute capturing Seema Kohli’s involvement and the whole process of the making of the artworks at...
Grid of 84 archival prints of self-portraits, of 10x10inch. The cycle of life revolves around birth, death and the eventual liberation from mortality. All forms of life follow...
Single Channel Installation Performance & Concept: Seema KohliCinematography: Marlène Ila Popovic, Sakthi BhagatEditing: Marlene Ila PopovicSound Design: Sahil Vasudeva “We see death as a full stop. But it...
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...
Art Heritage Gallery, NSIC Grounds, New Delhi
Art Heritage Gallery, NSIC Grounds, New Delhi
Bihar Museum
Presented by Sanchit Art Gallery At The Arts House, Singapore
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco presented by the Lara Lakshimi Foundation
Tao Art Gallery
Pacific Art League, Palo Alto, California
National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) New Delhi
Travancore Palace • Bikaner House • India Habitat Centre, New Delhi
Presented by Museum of Sacred Art At MOSA Radhadesh Gallery, Belgium
Kolkata Centre for Creativity, Kolkata
Venue: Sunder Nursery, New Delhi, Presented by Gallery Ragini
Hong Kong Visual Arts Center, Hong Kong, presented by Sanchit Art Gallery
Archer Art Gallery Ahmedabad, India
S.A. Fine Arts, Cromwell Place, London
Bikaner House, New Delhi presented by Gallerie Nvya
Gallerie Nvya, Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi
Bihar Museum, Patna
Shridharani Gallery at Triveni Kala Sangam, presented by Gallerie Nvya, Delhi
Lalit Kala Akademi, Chennai
National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru
Seema Kohli Studio, New Delhi and The Partition Museum, Delhi
Sculptures, Bronze
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Paperworks, Paintings
Paperworks, Etching
Sculptures, Bronze
Sculptures, Bronze
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Sculptures, Bronze
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Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Sculptures, Bronze
Paperworks, Etching
Paperworks, Paintings
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Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Sculptures, Glass-Reinforced Polymer
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Threadworks, Cloth
Threadworks, Cloth
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Paperworks, Paintings
Paperworks, Etching
Paperworks, Etching
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Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
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Paperworks, Etching
Paperworks, Etching
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Threadworks, Embroidery
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Threadworks, Embroidery
Sculptures, Bronze
Sculptures, Bronze
Sculptures, Bronze
Sculptures, Glass-Reinforced Polymer
Sculptures, Glass-Reinforced Polymer
Sculptures, Glass-Reinforced Polymer
Sculptures, Glass-Reinforced Polymer
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Paperworks, Paintings
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Canvas, Oil On Canvas
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Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Woodworks, Acrylic On Wood
Woodworks, Acrylic On Wood
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Sculptures, Bronze
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Paperworks, Etching
Canvas, Archival Print
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Sculptures, Paintings
Threadworks, Cloth
Paperworks, Paintings
Paperworks, Paintings
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Paperworks, Lithographs
Paperworks, Lithographs
Paperworks, Lithographs
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Threadworks, Embroidery
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Paperworks, Zinc Plate Intaglio Print
Paperworks, Zinc Plate Intaglio Print
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Paperworks, Zinc Plate Intaglio Print
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Paperworks, Zinc Plate Intaglio Print
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Paperworks, Etching
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Threadworks, Embroidery
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Threadworks, Embroidery
Sculptures, Wooden
Sculptures, Sandstone
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Sculptures, Bronze
Sculptures, Bronze
Sculptures, Bronze
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Woodcut
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Threadworks, Embroidery
Paperworks, Etching
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
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Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas
Threadworks, Embroidery
Threadworks, Embroidery
Threadworks, Embroidery
Threadworks, Embroidery
Sculptures, Bronze
Sculptures, Bronze
Sculptures, Bronze
Sculptures, Bronze
Sculptures, Bronze
Sculptures, Bronze
Sculptures, Bronze
Sculptures, Bronze
Sculptures, Bronze
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Paperworks, Archival Photographic Works / Drawings
Khula Aasman
Khula Aasman
Khula Aasman
Khula Aasman
The Golden Womb Series
Khula Aasman
Khula Aasman
Khula Aasman
Tree of life
Khula Aasman
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