Soghra Khurasani: Garland Tribute

Soghra Khurasani, like B. Karuna, hails from the south of India. Khurasani did her undergraduate work at Andhra University, Vishakhapatnam, and continued her education by taking a post graduate degree from M. S. University, Baroda. Her major was painting, but it is in the woodcut print that Soghra seems to have found her forte.

Blood is a recurring theme in the artist's work. The arteries, veins and corpuscles that transmit nutrients and oxygen throughout the body provide a deep fascination for Khurasani. In blood the artist finds not just a biological imperative or an evolutionary continuum. Rather, the mechanisms/plumbing of the circulatory system are transformed into metaphors for human conditions and feelings. Or is it the opposite...that human conditions and feelings are transformed into biological reality?

Such transformations can be observed in the artist's large scale works such as Tribute to Blood and Flow Between Territories (a mammoth woodcut triptych and tetraptych, each measuring 6 x 12 feet). The slightly smaller triptych Brave Heart (which can be seen here: http://worksatone.blogspot.com/2010/12/blog-post.html) continues the artist's equation of circulatory system to human emotion. For Khurasani, the heart becomes representative of human frailty/endurance, and blood a reference to personal space. Seen in the context of Khurasani's wider oeuvre, even smaller creations such as the lithograph Blood Cells evokes ruminations on genealogy, inherited situations, clannishness, and the courageous possibility of personal choice. Blood becomes the "fluid of life"...a personal wellspring derived from inheritance and contained within the fragility of the self.

The artist states: My work Garland Tribute honors the anonymous heroic people who all are wronged and thus become a prey by the follies of human beings. The bold roses may count for the innumerable people who have fallen prey to these situations.

But it is impossible not to notice that this "garland of roses" in fact congeals into another representation of blood...a single red blood cell...the red blood cell being the purveyor of nutrients and oxygen (life) not only to individuals, but to the entire system of humankind. The artist is taking the concepts that lurk behind cliches such as "by their own sweat and blood" and "blood of the land", and reinvigorating them with biological probes into their true, sanguine, meaning.