She Walks You Through the Room

You meet Sonia in the gallery. Pink walls. Scrolls of script hanging in the room. She is smiling, and the work is behind her, not as wallpaper. I Will Meet You Yet Again: Contemporary Sikh Art is that walk. Twenty minutes. Her curatorial debut. The camera stays with her as she names what the room is holding.

The exhibition was Main Tainu Fir Milangi: Contemporary Sikh Art at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. It ran January 28 to May 26, 2024. The title comes from Amrita Pritam's poem. UCLA asked. Sonia said yes.

What the room holds

Forty works. Twenty artists. Five countries. Sonia wanted to stop pairing Sikh art with only religion and history. Partition. 1984. The farmers' protest. Women's labor. All in the same walk.

Three pieces were commissioned for the show. Nisha Sethi's work centers on Kartar Dhillon, documented as the first Sikh woman born in the United States. Harleen Kaur and Gurjote Sethi built a Darbar Sahib installation you enter through one doorway, with a soundscape in a female voice. The Amrita Pritam portrait runs her verses in Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi, split by a red line that stands for the border.

It ends somewhere personal. Sonia's mother is 85. She left what became Pakistan as a child. She still wants to go back.

Sonia says the line the film is built around: the art that is created today is the history of tomorrow.

Why watch it now

Named curator. Named museum. Named works. You can talk about a room you can picture, not a slogan. That is why this one belongs on the blog while the film is in front of people.

Watch it for the walk. Stay for how cleanly Sonia trusts the art to carry partition, protest, and a mother who still wants the road home, without turning any of that into a lecture.