Seema Kohli's Show

“Hiranya Garbha Purusha Pradhana Avyakta Rupine
Om Namah Vaasudevaye Shudh Gyan Svarupine”

I bow to Him, the one with the golden womb, who is both the eternal soul and the nature (Prakriti), the subtle and hidden.

I bow to Lord Vasudev, who has the form of pure knowledge (or who is seen through knowledge that is pure).

Myths and legends in different cultures across continents celebrate and validate the varied and diverse aspects of women. Beauty, grace and charm, the classical attributes that make the quintessential feminine woman, have led to them being divine or semi-divine beings.

Feminine beauty has been celebrated across the ages. Through the period and all over the world, the feminine form has been adored, loved and worshipped. The woman is either in the realm of the goddess or in the form of celestial maidens as the apsaras. She is the emblem of sexuality, sensuality and eternal love.

A woman dons numerous faces – a young girl, a submissive wife, a giving mother, a fiery enchantress, a lover possessed. She is the ageless woman who is portrayed in Indian literature as the pious Sita, the sensuous and seductive Mohini, the fierce Kali, the goddess of plenitude – Lakhshmi, the stupendous Durga and the lovelorn Radha.

In Greek mythology, springing from the primordial chaos, the woman is Gaia, the Earth, the supporter. In Chinese mythology, she is familiar as Hu-tu; in Mesopotamian culture, she is acknowledged as Ninhursag. The Romans celebrated her as the Goddess Minerva, the Goddess of arts and crafts.

Sexuality permeates all of human life, a kind of an energy that emanates from a certain space in the body and causes specific physiological reactions. Getting a glance at the feminine world with its inherent complexities and contradictions, the women are often depicted as objects of desire, the icons of fertility. As the first creative stirring of an ineffable ultimate reality, whose trace can be felt in all forms of life and death, the goddess Kali as desire, embodies all creativity, owing to her dual nature of motherliness and wild fierceness.

Goddess Durga, worshipped as the fertile womb of the world, giving birth to all life. She is the reflection and manifestation of supreme beauty and deadly power. She is the shakti, the cosmic energy, the divine force that cannot be destroyed. At the same time, Durga is full of affection and love. She supports, sustains and nurtures life while the man, the masculine principle, implants the seeds of creation, contained in the seminal fluid. It is the female anatomy that is the location where the seed of life unites and burst forth as an entity itself.

Mohini, a goddess with supernatural beauty is beautiful in a manner no woman could be, a fantastic version of feminity. Trying to possess this impossibly beguiling ‘woman’ is what drove men mad.

Goddess Parvati with her charming personality, is adored by many married women for a happy married life.

As Venus was represented by the Greeks to stand forth as the type of the beauty of woman, so the Hindus describe the Padmini or Lotus woman as the type of most perfect feminine excellence. Her face is pleasing as the full moon, her body, well clothed with flesh, is soft as the Shiras or mustard flower, her skin is fine, tender and fair. Coming from the four classes of women, the ancient sage Vatsyayana focuses on how they become the subject to love.

Radha’s splendour of her youth and enchanting beauty has been an inspiration for songs and dances over the centuries.

It is from this domain of sacred feminine geography that an effulgence of energy emanates from the paintings of Seema Kohli’s. Myth, memory and imagination have become the handmaiden of her own artistic oeuvre. Within the genres of sexuality and desire, one can’t ignore the parallel journeys of discovery that she has made in the more experimental media. Seema Kohli’s works reveal a claiming of feminine subjectivities, an altered concept of feminine sexuality. It brings into focus a woman’s physical attributes, her intellect, thought, her dreams and realities. There is a celebration of beauty, sensuality and intimacy in her art.

Seema Kohli as an artist digests and imbibes all these ideas. Being a student of philosophy, she has inhaled and experienced myriad notions of existence, her lived reality, her emotional reality and her psychological reality.

Her work validates in different mediums in the past eighteen years, some constant being the search for the self, creativity and destruction. The celebration of life itself in its tumultuous journey - birth, creation, sensuality and desire.

To express this she has used different mythological figures that fascinated her. The most recent engagement has been that of the ‘Hiranya garbha’ Though the Golden Womb series evolved from a mantra of Yajur Veda, but it simply evolved in reflecting the quite and subtle beauty of constant procreation. All the works are a prayer to the eternal self - a way of meditation. These works are spiritual but not religious, exploring with it a poetically elegant and richly sensuous female form.

The productive and reproductive powers of nature have often been symbolised by people in world history, the most familiar being the sacred function of motherhood. For many minds, the womb has seemed an especially suggestive emblem in the nature's reproductive principles on the macrocosmic scale.

The ancient Hindu mythology presents a number of accounts pertaining to the cosmology. Several explanations have been given as regards to the origin of the universe and its formation. The most popular belief is that the universe emerged from Hiranya garbha, meaning the ‘golden womb’. Hiranya garbha floated around in water in the emptiness and the darkness of its non-existence. Ultimately, this golden egg had split and the cosmos was created. Swarga emerged from the golden upper part of the Hiranya garbha, whereas Prithvi (earth) came out from the silver coloured lower half part.

The ‘Golden Womb’ is a celebration through which the supremacy of a female is established and how she procreates and keeps the journey of life, forever on. Her work is symbolic of the progress and recycling of thought processes in the human mind, which is being seen as calmer, more mature and more serene both in terms of palette and form. All her works are a gesture of the divine, a prayer to the eternal self, a way of meditation.

Coupled with myth and memory, innumerable tales describe the feminine, there are the goddesses who strike their children with fever, nymphs who seduce sages, celestial virgins who run free in forests and chaste wives who fling themselves on funeral pyres to become guardians feminine virtue. In the domain of the ‘Riti Kalin Kavya’, medieval Bhakti poetry and ‘Saundarya Lahiri’, the feminine has been adored, loved and worshipped. The pursuit of external beauty is narrated, where verses on women described them as a haunting melody and glorious sunset.

The Indian woman today is proud of her feminity and aware of her power. She reveals in it, and most of all – asks her male companion to acknowledge her special needs as being equally as important as his.

As we scroll through the world map, desire, erotic pleasure finds an important and significant emphasis in the cultural ethos of all ancient civilizations. This exhibition attempts to address the celebration of sensuality, which has been part and parcel of the Indian consciousness since the dawn of civilizations. Through the works of Seema Kohli, the exhibition attempts to address the continuous mappings of sensuality, sexuality and desire.

“Profound thought was the pillow of her couch,
Vision was the unguent for her eyes.
Her wealth was the earth and Heaven”

Dr. Alka Pande
Curator

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