The sentient body: silver and split — Rencontre avec Sonia Khurana — Villa Vassilieff — Event — Slash Paris

Past: Saturday, June 11, 2016 11 AM → 12:30 PM

The treatment of the body in the domain of art and in the world has been and continues to be a contentious issue, raising questions of cultural fragmentation, the circulation of the imagined and physical body and the interchangeability of perceptions. By putting these questions into practice, the performative video and photographic artwork of Sonia Khurana, whose piece Bird is currently on show at Villa Vassilieff, instigates a theoretical and practical enquiry into modernist, feminist and cultural discourses.

The questions and enquiries Khurana brings to her work acts as a prompt for the viewer to problematize a definition of ‘the body,’ its materiality and to question precisely the definition of the sentient body. Khurana interrogates and dis-members the canonical Eurocentric gaze of the body, through references to high Modernists castes such as Brancusi, only to reassemble certain fragments and highlight the interwoven nature of the self and other. In doing so Khurana traces the trajectory of the body throughout history and decenters the Eurocentric gaze to foreground alternative subjectivities.

For this session Khurana will be discussing her work Head-Hand:

“The two body parts, the head and the hand, the primary sites of social interaction, meet in an intimate encounter. Their differences become spaces of encounter; spaces of communality and transmission, affection, trust and attachment neither in spite of nor because of difference, but rather precisely through their difference. Khurana thus addresses identity politics here as a work of connections, rather than deconstructions, as an expedition into reflections, rather than diffractions.”¹

¹ Excerpt from essay: Body, relation and reciprocity: Artworks by Sonia Khurana by Elena Trivelli and Leon Wainwright, 2015.

Language: English.

Place : Villa Vassilieff
21 rue du Maine, 15e arrondissement.