Sonia Khurana

Select viewings:

Public Places, Private Spaces: Recent Indian Video and Photography, Rutgers University, New Jersey, 2007

Still Moving Image (solo exhibition), Gallerie Jousse Enterprise, Paris, 2007

Self into Social, J.N.U, New Delhi, 2005; Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kusten, Amsterdam, 2004

The entire length of this video, frames the close-up shot of a hand playing with a head as a continuously running loop. The seemingly-female hand is constantly at play with the head of a sleeping man. Sometimes energetic and sometimes languorous, the cat-like strokes of the hand dip in and out of various shades of power-play and fore-play. As the hand pets, plays, caresses and violates, it becomes unclear as to which of them is the object of this affection, and indeed the aggression.

The unsettling nature of the dynamics between the two is further suggested by the careful use of the formal elements such as skin tones and framing. '...Khurana, in a brief, single-channel work, uses her intelligence like a scalpel to defetishize the body, but polemically: freeing it both from the malign-male-gaze syndrome and from the sincerity of female protagonists bent on seizing the supposed moment of metaphysical evacuation to foreground female desire. Does the ungainly little hand of the fair-skinned artist in Head-Hand seduce, or soothe, or appropriate, or love the Brancusi-like head of the black man "asleep"¿and does he, indifferent to the tricks of the naked hand, claim her, however gratuitously? Is there in the drama of subtle cruelties entailing the erotic some form of sexual reparation? The single-channel, silent loop plays the mute action in close-up, the hand strokes and pinches, reading the skull in braille. There is the fetish and there is the play of curiosity¿and who wins love? ..'  (Geeta Kapur, Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, 2007).