Lounge
A poetic reflection of the fragility of the body
Summary
Yardena Kurulkar’s latest exhibition is a personal and philosophical enquiry into the body’s relationship with nature
Yardena Kurulkar’s current exhibition, The Body in Agreement, at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, is an attempt to further her ongoing personal examination into the human body and its relationship with nature. After her initial training in ceramics, the artist’s practice has been multidisciplinary and is expressed here through multi-layered etchings, video projections, 3D printed works, composite sculptures made of clay, brass and wood, and more.
A definitive work that highlights the evolution of her practice is Kenosis (2015), which means “to empty out" in Greek. It started her deep dive inside her human body, while also marking a departure from her earlier loop-based works. In Kenosis, she did an MRI of her own heart to “digitally excavate the organ" from her body. Kurulkar then converted that into a 3D version, and therefrom created a clay replica of her heart. She then submerged it in water and captured its dissolution at regular intervals, 15 frames of which were chronologically arranged in a grid to form the visually cathartic work.
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“I am interested in the study of the material and their disintegration, sometimes also their renewal. I am interested in capturing that process, the transformation—the movement from one stage to another," says the Mumbai-based artist. Her choice of clay and water as materials to work with are revelatory. As the porous, unfired clay appears to dissolve in the water gradually and the frames get muddier, it serves as a poetic reflection of the fragility of the body and its ephemerality.
The work sets up a dialogue with the video projection Mostly Empty Space (2024), which one sees later in the exhibition. In the video, Kurulkar releases 12 terracotta pots, which cumulatively symbolise the number of breaths she realised she takes in a minute, with the air in each pot equivalent to a single breath. The audio actually captures the sound of the clay and its dissolution as it touches the water. “I was thinking about the space between the inhalation and the exhalation. In the video, my body overlaps at some points representing that," Kurulkar shares.
Air and the act of breathing are fundamental to her body-based practice, just as they are critical to life itself. For Breath of Sorrow (2024), also in the exhibition, she did an MRI of her own lungs and created a mould, and thereby captured her breath and preserved it in the space within. The lungs are signifiers of sorrow and loss, but also of emotional resilience.
To create the series of etchings titled The Body in Agreement (2024) after which this exhibition is named, the artist visited the Jewish cemetery in Chinchpokli, Mumbai. There, she collected leaves and twigs which she placed on zinc plates and etched multiple layers. “For me, the idea is about time that has passed. It underlines the fact that the physical body becomes connected (with nature)." For the last layer, the artist created her own impression on the plates. “I had no control over my own body while these marks were being made. I was listening to my own pre-recorded, voice-based instructions and I made the marks intuitively with the help of the sounds that I was listening to", she says. “Through the work, I am integrating my body into nature in a symbolic way."
In another absorbing work There’s Something not Quite Right in the Air (2024), Kurulkar frames a visual manifesto for healing the air around us. Created by stitching a cobweb of medical sutures “through the air" which flows in and out of a wooden frame and serves as the imagined body with its wounds. The work is contained by the frame but significantly not enclosed by it. “This is very relevant for me both as an individual, and as a person of Bene Israeli heritage in the times we live in, fraught with crises and a foreboding sense of collapse. The work represents so many things in the world that remain unresolved, and need to be healed."
Lost in Spaces Between the Light (2024) is a sprawling installation—a hybrid between a horse carriage and a wheelchair made from wood, stoneware clay, wool, rubber and 3D printed polymers. The artist calls it a “sculptural amalgamation of memory and objects from her own personal history". The chair embodies the body—both in its presence and absence. The spine that runs through the backrest (of the chair) is a cast of her own spine, as are the hands and feet that extend from it.
Kurulkar’s artistic practice has always been a deeply personal, profound, and philosophical enquiry of the human body. In this exhibition she continues to investigate its impermanence but also explores its eventual union with nature. The choice of materials, whether it is clay, cotton, or the air itself, are fragile, organic and unfixed, allowing scope for transformation. Paradoxically, death and disintegration seem to represent the merging of the self into something bigger and more universal. Across her works, the final outcome is not predetermined, accentuating the element of chance underlying our lives.
At Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, till 18 December.
Anindo Sen is an art and culture writer.
