Yardena Kurulkar

b. 1971, in Mumbai, India

Yardena Elhanan Kurulkar was born in 1971. She completed her BFA from Sir J J School of Art, Mumbai and her MFA from The University of Wales Institute, Cardiff.

Yardena Kurulkar's artistic practice is her attempt to understand and overcome life, death, destruction, the ephemeral and the eternal through personal experiences, performances and creations. Her art deconstructs the façade of similarities, contradictions and interdependence and highlights the temporary and transient boundaries of presence and absence. With the notion of the ever-present ephemeral, Kurulkar’s art creates an inquiry into the manner in which, the beauty of the human condition lies in eternal suspension between life and death. She explores the cycle of life transforming it into a contemplation, through inherently personal subjects and objects, including her own body. Through an existing panel of memories, she subversively opens the withheld dialogue of immortality. The eventuality of death is not seen as a cataclysmic event as it is already in motion, in a continuous almost circadian rhythm. Offering classified perspectives from numerous vantage points, Kurulkar encapsulates the continued waltz between existence and obliteration, no matter the direction, lens or portion of her identity.

Yardena’s practice merges various mediums such as photography, drawing, sculpture and video. Time, an important medium for Kurulkar, is used as a pace to understand and accept her own given time on earth. Materials such as porcelain, clay and water further convey the idea of fragility and change. Similarly her ephemeral works are staged confrontations in which, the beginning is planned, but not the end. The artist’s only intervention is to document and in some way arrest in a frame the passing moment, which is otherwise impossible.