Sonia Khurana

Bird, 2000

Sonia Khurana is one of India’s most discussed performance artist, using her body, physical movement and sound in the practice of her art to explore situational contexts and underlying realities. On the significance of feminist discourses for her work, Khurana says: “I work with a discourse of power that is deliberately tangential. Even as I try to re-map established realms, my natural predilection is to do this through deliberately poetic intimations, through which I persistently explore and re-define the space of the political. I like to believe that anyone who engages with their own humanity, and to whom equality is integral, is feminist.” (S.K.) The video Bird shows the artist herself trying, defying the earth’s gravitational pull, to ascend like a roundish bird that has lost its power but not its will to fly. The humor, the effervescence and simultaneous ponderousness, tells of a hopeless but insatiable longing for freedom and levity.