PROJECT HOME
Multimedia artist Seema Kohli grew up amid stories about the family’s ancestral land and their home at Pind Dadan Khan in West Punjab, now in Pakistan. Despite being uprooted during Partition and the upheaval the family had to undergo, these stories were, surprisingly, about love, and the beauty of their relationship with the land, people, nature and the rivers. This nostalgia was a persistent presence in the Kohli household. To a young Seema, it felt like a distant space, as if being tied to the memory of a land she had never seen. Her attempt to understand it is today a thriving multimedia art project — ‘Khula Aasman’, showing at two venues across New Delhi. Its earlier edition was ‘Project Home’.
The Delhi-based artist’s family spoke of it all the time. “My family had lived there for over 18 generations; the land remained close to their hearts and soul. But while there was a sense of nostalgia, there was no urge to go back,” Seema recalls. Her father’s reminiscences sparked her fascination. But the idea of an ancestral homeland felt like an unreachable fairy tale. Her journey to understand the past began when her late father, KD Kohli, decided to finally write his memoirs, ‘Mitr Pyare Nu’, a book that took shape over 15 long years and is being released at the Jaipur Literature Festival.
As she helped her father gather his recollections, recording his childhood memories and the journey to India, Seema began visualising everything he described — the food they ate, their traditions and culture, rivers, the land and the sky, the animals, and the connections to her grandfather’s practice of hikmat, Yunani medicine. “My grandfather was both a Yunani and ayurvedic hakeem. He travelled from Rawalpindi to Tibbia College in Karol Bagh, Delhi, to study hikmat. His knowledge and practices had subtly influenced our family’s food habits and behaviour,” shares Seema.
Deeply inspired, she began interpreting her father’s stories in her own visual language through images and art. Finally, after many years of gestation and over two years of implementation, she was able to create a body of work that became the foundation of ‘Project Home’, curated by Adwait, an art curator. This project made use of memorabilia, photographs and objects used in those days and delved into the family legacy of treatment of diseases through medicinal herbs. ‘Khula Aasman’ is a continuation, but different in approach — it took a flight of fantasy, delving into what Seema calls “the hidden side of Partition”, a chronicle of a people who never gave up.
The project is spread across two venues — Dara Shikoh Library at Ambedkar University and Seema Kohli Studio in Okhla. “It integrates various mediums, such as paintings, installations, collages and a narrative performance by Sunil Mehra and Pallav Mishra, who perform a reading of my father’s book. Additionally, there are talks by several other contributors. It is not just about my personal history or my family’s past. It is about sharing the broader experience of nostalgia that spans generations of a society.”
The artist’s father often spoke of Choha Saidan Shah’s fields of roses that were crossed on camelbacks during pilgrimages to the nearby shrines of Katas Raj. In her paintings, she has tried to recreate those landscapes, the trees, the flowers, the birds, the bees, the clouds… The gelatin prints were created from photographs taken in the 1930s, with a camera given to her father by his older brother. KD Kohli passed it on to Seema in the 1980s while she was studying applied arts. The project also features a three-projection installation video film, for which Seema created a complete soundtrack in collaboration with Tushar Adhav; among others, it features the voice of her father.
The title ‘Khula Aasman’ evokes hope. Seema says she owes it to her father, who taught her how to broaden the viewpoint by looking at the infinite sky. “When I was about five or six years old, my father would ask us what we saw ahead of us. At the most, I would say my friend’s house… or a tree… another house in the other lane, a little far off. But my father would nudge us and say, ‘You did not look up. There is an infinite sky.’ That’s what gave me the possibility to understand imagination right from my childhood.”
Seema sees a parallel in the lives of refugees. “In 1947, these people came empty-handed. The future was not certain. But they had a promise in their heart — to build something new for themselves. They found immense opportunities. Every time I look at a blank canvas, I can see the possibilities. There is always something lying ahead of us and that’s what I think ‘Khula Aasman’ means to me,” she says.
While the world stands hugely divided and India now commemorates a Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, does Seema believe that remembrance heals wounds? “I do not believe remembrance heals wounds. Love does.”