Department of Visual Arts

Invites you to the VA Colloquium

 Notes on Artworking

Since the late 1990s, Sonia Khurana has fashioned a range of artworks that place the body in oblique relation to the feminist aesthetics of  the counter-spectacle, to offer trans-disciplinary perspectives on the gendered, social, and sentient body. In much of her practice, the self and the body are the intimate, visceral, and emotional fields of interaction. The somatic and ontological turn of these 'body events' requires a philosophical mode of inquiry, locating the radical politics of these body events for new sorts of reciprocal and embodied relations with viewers.

Her presentation,' Notes on Artworking' will focus on exploring, various themes through her oeuvre. The singular formulation of the melancholy of emplacement and displacement, dereliction and abjection, space and time, memory and the body. A body that sings and dances, the living, sleeping, breathing body; the vernacular body, as self, caught in constant encounters and distractions enmeshed in the material world.

Thursday, 9 November 2023

Venue – AC04 # 302

Time 1:30 pm  

Sonia Khurana works with photo, video, performance, text, drawing, sound, music, voice, architecture and installation. working with a discourse of power that is deliberately tangential, she structures the self through states of strangeness, alienation, displacement, and embodiment. Her single channel video Bird, produced in 1999 while she was at the Royal College of Arts in London placed her both within the feminist discourse and for working primarily with moving. She is one of India's most discussed artists using performance, the body, and digital media, to explore situational contexts and underlying realities. Her work has been shown globally, since 1998, in some notable exhibitions such as Centre Pompidou(2009/2010) in France, in the United States during the Global Feminisms exhibition in Brooklyn (2002), and in several biennales including the Aichi Triennale (2010), the Liverpool Biennale[2010], the Busan Biennale (2004), and the Gwangju Biennale (2008) as well as appearing in the seminal exhibition ''West Heavens'' in Shanghai (2010). She has publicly performed in  various institutions and cities, notably at Goethe-Institut, New Delhi(2000); the Busan Biennale (2004); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2007); Gwangju Biennale (2008); the KHOJ Live Performance Art Festival, New Delhi (2008); Center  Pompidou, Paris(2009-11); and the Aichi Triennale(2010). Sonia lives and works in Delhi, has occasionally taught in various places globally, and has also been writing and publishing essays on questions of power and the performative body.

Looking forward to having you with us!

Department of Visual Arts