The Body in Agreement: Yardena Kurulkar

 A series of etchings in Yardena Kurulkar’s exhibition The Body in Agreement, including one that has given its title to the show, were created from impressions left by leaves, twigs, and weeds the artist gathered from the Jewish cemetery in Chinchpokli. It is oddly appropriate for art of such lyricism and beauty to originate in a graveyard, because central Bombay’s old burial grounds are tranquil places of shade trees and birdsong in the midst of a metropolis filled with noise and chaos. The mood and style of these etchings points to a shift in perspective, one that has involved coming to terms with mortality while extending the artist’s abiding preoccupations with corporal fragility, the gradual decomposition of bodies, their merging with nature.

As is common in her practice, Yardena has incorporated medical materials and outputs from therapeutic devices into the present group of works. The repose of the night does not belong to us is an abstract arrangement painted with dyes used in capsules, overlaid in part with an unraveled, tessellated mesh of her own brain. In There’s Something Not Quite Right in the Air, she crafts a delicate network from knotted surgical sutures normally employed to hold wounded flesh together. 

These works, concerned with traces and absences, things unseen but implied, are balanced by others that are more solid, present, sculptural. A replica of the artist’s spine merged with a chair from which innards spill; a ceramic cast of her arm which, shrunken in the process of drying and firing, looks like the torn-off limb of a child, introducing an echo of political violence alongside the persistent theme of illness.

In a video shot in the vicinity of the location where the founding members of her Bene Israel community are said to have been shipwrecked, she places one by one twelve clay pots into a pond, each receptacle having been shaped by a single sharp breath. Although Yardena does not follow formal religion, her process of creating the pots brings to mind a passage from Genesis: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”. The clay vessels are symbolic bodies that she consigns to water with a subtle gesture of acknowledgement and acceptance, both a benediction and a valediction. 

- Girish Shahane, 2024