(Top) Dramatic video art Head-hand, 2004. (Bottom) Bird (2002), presenting the unhidden physical form of contemporary women (video collection of Centre Pompidou). Somia Khurana’s "Still Moving Image" solo exhibition is on display from June 2 to July 28 at both Jousee Entreprise and Enrico Navarra galleries.

Somia Khurana is currently one of India’s most representative video artists, living and working in New Delhi, the capital of India. She studied television imagery at the Delhi College of Art and furthered her studies at the Royal College of Art in London, UK. In 2002, she was invited to participate in a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Currently, she is participating in the group exhibition "Global Feminism" held at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Her video art features often rely on performances involving personal and collaborative exhibitions, attempting to develop the relationship between the individual and the audience through deepened personal bodily experiences, thereby exploring the different tensions of contemporary society, culture, and obscenity.

In the 13th district at the Jousee Entreprise gallery, she exhibits three striking works: Bird, Head-hand, and Tantra. I had previously seen Bird (2002) two years ago at the "Indian Contemporary Art" special exhibition at the Paris Institute of Art, which left a lasting impression and caught my attention; I did not expect to encounter it again today. It documents the process of the artist performing naked alone on a stage. A robust body balances its weight and strength on a platform through several continuous rolling movements, intimately questioning the characteristics of the body, thereby developing extremes of two bodies. First, the contrast between the body under its own fat weight and the balance of strong gravity is poetically presented as the unhidden physical form of contemporary women. This work has now entered the video collection of the Centre Pompidou.

The most internalized is Head-hand (2004), which is quite mesmerizing. It shows the side profile of a sleeping Black person (eyes never open throughout the process), with a white hand contrasting against the black skin constantly touching this head. It emits a deeply emotional and intimate sense of an indescribable inner feeling. In a field that is not so conventional, it is a work where the artist meets the other in an unexpected convergence performance. The most eye-catching is Tantra (2005), which presents a scene of a woman muttering sleepily late at night, metaphorically suggesting that life is like an illusion or dream, allowing the audience to perceive the situation manifesting between the present moment and the past instant, reinforcing the metaphysical nature of experience and the ambiguity of the body.

Somia Khurana describes her own works as follows: "Many of my video works are based on the concept of impact of extended performances, simultaneously adding possible control and the relationship with the future audience."