By Heart
2023 | Porcelain, cobalt oxide, narration of Where the mind is without fear by Rabindrnath Tagore and Looking down at the books by Kushala Vora in the artist’s voice.
Installation and performance
With each beat and breath, the body is imprinted upon with innumerable social conditionings. Kushala Vora grew up in the hill station of Panchgani. In the shadow of multiple empires that came and went and continue to exist, she subconsciously imbibed hidebound systems of hierarchy, fear and power and colonial attitudes. To break the conditioning associated with her own education, she revisits a poem Where the mind is without fear written by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore in anticipation of freedom, 46 years before independence. Chiseled at the entrance of her high school, Kushala would see the poem everyday while living a personal reality that was far from it. She wrote a poem in response, questioning our ways and asking us to imagine another future, pointing again to Tagore’s dream.
By Heart is created from the accumulated gesture of writing and imprinting both Tagore’s and her poem onto porcelain. By actively bringing into her conscious memory the visual markers and residues of colonial power, she seeks to unmake sets of micro-habits.
KUSHALA VORA is a dreamer, community organizer and an interdisciplinary artist based in Panchgani, India and Chicago, USA. In and through her practice she focuses on loosening the exertion of power on oneself, another and the landscape that we reside with. Kushala is one of Chicago’s Newcity 2023 Breakout Artists. She has recently been an artist in residence at The Hyde Park Art Center, Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing, and Anderson Ranch Art Center. Kushala received a MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds a post-graduate diploma in Modern and Contemporary Indian Art History and Curatorial Studies from Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai, India. She is the co-founder of Atmo - a reading + praxis forum, and is an active contributor of Spaceshift Collective and Floating Museum.
