Real stories on video

In 2001, artist Sonia Khurana reached Berlin and was robbed of her wallet almost immediately, at the historic Alexanderplatz. This made her arrival in a new city even more complicated, and left her to negotiate Berlin broke and by her self. Then, she stopped a taxi and a chance conversation with the cabbie, Tom, left them both emotionally charged. Tom, it turned out, was a healer. He had studied under a teacher who had died, leaving him sad and his instruction incomplete. He returned to Berlin and began driving a taxi, with little time to be a healer. This healer, in London, was Sonia’s uncle. In a swift minute, the world had collapsed into a much smaller place, and two complete strangers sought refuge in each other’s trajectories.

Her video, 5 Visits, is borne of that one extraordinary evening in Berlin, tautly stretched out over several more months of conversation and filming.

Directing a video camera at both herself and Tom, in conversation, Sonia creates a loose dialogue, where this unlikely connection unravels slowly. Her use of close ups of both herself and Tom, of them facing each other in silence and of a slow, deliberate conversation, create a rich timbre that reverberates through the work. When, like an ornate rug, the video is all rolled out, it serves as the canvas for the larger portrait of intimacy, an intangible channel that bonds people, places adding layers to their self-perception in the most unlikely ways.

Essential to this work, and indeed to Sonia’s oeuvre, is the underlying theme of vulnerability, an essential pre-requisite to intimacy. Tom’s own mourning of his lost guru is apparent as he opens up to talking about his loss. He meets Sonia every time she visits Berlin, and looks after her as both the niece of her relative but also finds a serendipitous opportunity to seek closure after the death of a teacher he loved. Sonia learns to see Berlin with Tom, and uses these visits to create a unique portrait of Berlin, which she continuously splices in the video. Her shots of the mundane — a duck, for example — underscore her spectacularly rich narrative. Positioning the lens to close-up around herself or Tom, even both, Sonia builds on the increasing intensity-quotient, to a searing poignancy that becomes almost unbearable because it is real.

If Berlin was a strange city — not Sonia’s city — then no one place is home even now. In another video, Living in the Round, Sonia uses her grandmother’s traumatic displacement from Pakistan in 1947 to calibrate her own peripatetic life. In this video, her grandmother recalls her eviction from what was her home, torn through with smaller and continuous displacement. She never really settled in. It is shown in a large steel shipping container, placed on the lawns of the Max Mueller Bhawan in Delhi. On the wall, in the manner of a giant TV screen, plays Sonia’s video. The sparse, light furniture becomes a convenience rather than an embarrassment, being easy to re-assembling constantly. Using the device of a rock solid container, Sonia interrogates this seemingly secure vessel, and the notion of secure containment, a notion she seems to half mock, half wish. That she terms it a temporary installment that will move to multiple cities parallels such dispossession.

These personal cartographies are not merely about Sonia ensconcing her practice in both the local and the global. Indeed, her local is amorphous. Rather, she struggles acutely against finding an anchor that her works can rest on. This fuzziness is the challenge she both addresses and creates in her art making.