Sonia Khurana

Still/Moving Image, Gallerie Phillipe Jousse/Enrico Navarra, Paris, June-July 2007

Video screenings:

Global Feminisms, the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, March 2007-March 2008
Artists' Airshow, Arts Catalyst, London, July 2007
Classe De Dans, Tanztheater/Progr, Bern, May-June 2007
Private/Corporate, The Daimler Chrysler contemporary art exhibition, Berlin, January 2007
Hungry God, Museum Arario Beijing, Beijing, September 2006
Passages, Museum Bozartes, Brussels, 2006
Indian Summer, Ecole National Superieur des Beaux Arts de Paris, Paris, October 2005
Body Perfect , Walsh Gallery, Chicago, May 2005
Edge of Desire: Recent art in India, A G W A,  Perth; Asia Society, New York; Tamayo Museum, Mexico City; NGMA, New Delhi, 2004-2006
Gender and Visuality, University of Western Cape, South Africa, August - September 2004
Rites/ Rights/ Rewrites, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, March 2004
History in Motion, Fukuoka Museum of Asian Art, Japan, February 2004
diverge, 50 years of  Chemould, NGMA, Bombay, December 2003
SubTerrain: Contemporary Art from India, House of World Cultures, Berlin, September 2003
The Seed from the Tree, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, January - May 2003
Amsterdam International Shorts Film Festival, Cinema de Balie, Amsterdam, March 2003
Kapital and Karma: Recent Positions in Indian Art, KunsthalleWienVienna, March 2002
Self: Video art from India. Institute for Modern Art, Brisbane, July 2002
Digital O, The Bangkok International Experimental Film Festival, Thailand, Hong Kong and Sweden, December, 2001
South African Women's Art Festival, Durban, August 2001
Lone Women Don't Lie (solo exhibition), New Delhi, 2000 and Calcutta, 2001

48 prints of video stills separately mounted on aluminum. The image in the fourth column from the left and three rows up from the bottom differs from the catalogue illustration and depicts the artist on the box - not on the floor. This image was the final choice of the artist from her video stills. Good overall condition.
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Bird : Re-take I is a story board in reverse, for the performance video made by the artist in 2000. The performance video presents the artist as a naked dancer attempting to fly.  The stills like the video, are black and white, silent, and performed, shot, edited and conceptualised by Sonia Khurana. The video stills attempt to capture the 'iconic resonance' embedded in single still images.

'Bird is about the enclosing nature of self-image and the inarticulateness of the body.  Bird is shot with an often-unstable, hand-held camera, while in rapid, fluid movement. The entire space becomes an interior for the revelations of a constantly turning body absorbed in trying to defy its limitations. The confluence and conflict of image, intent, content and emotion perpetually circulates and creates a tragic-comic feeling...The relationships between the elements of body, space and time create, together, a larger movement of the body as whole. The intent of such a depersonalization is not the destruction of the individual; on the contrary, it enlarges her beyond the personal dimension...Bird is about being a body. It is about an encounter with failed flight. It is an investigation of two kinds of limitations: the body confronting its own flesh and the forces of gravity, and a discrete questioning of accounts of the body which overlook sexual difference.' (Excerpts from an essay on the artist by Leon Wainwright).

'Sonia Khurana is part of the lineage of women working through the body into a space of erotic efflorescence recognized/shown to be (almost definitively) blocked, thwarted, problematized, and therefore won, if ever, by searing forms of self-exposure. Can she, with controlled states of neurosis, turn irony into gravitas? I refer to her performance video Bird (pl. 53), in which the artist as dancer, awkwardly naked, rolls, jumps, beats her arms, and tries to take off, holding the camera close to her flesh. As a dancer she fails to fly, but as the artist¿modulating the speed, editing the choreography into staccato-style balletic parody¿she, Chaplin-like, succeeds. The brief black-and-white video provides a kind of autographical trace of self-propelled liberation, but through a teasing travesty of formulaic autonomy. Bird is ironical for being embarrassing, and, being so classically antisublime, it is paradoxically iconic.' (Geeta Kapur, "Performing Selves," Global Feminism, catalogue for the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, March 2007-March 2008).