Ekaa – The One

Curatorial Intent By Shahzada Khurram (Cultural Strategist and Curator)

Curatorial Advisor – Ekaa The One

Shahzada Khurram is a cultural strategist, art curator, and programme director shaping dynamic art and institutional collaborations in New Delhi. Formerly Program Director at Bikaner House, he worked closely with the Rajasthan Government’s cultural leadership on exhibitions, residencies, partnerships, and major public programming.

Shahzada leads transnational and community-rooted projects such as Kaleidoscope of a Thread, a textile-photography collaboration with Siddi women in Karnataka. His curatorial interests span identity, memory, material culture, and representation. Engaged by institutions from the Partition Museum Delhi to international cultural missions, his work combines strategic acumen with a distinctive, mental-health-aligned leadership approach.

Curatorial Intent

I’ve always had a strong pull towards mentors, people with depth, clarity, and lived understanding. When I engaged with the artist, I recognised that immediately. It felt like learning in motion rather than instruction, and that made working together feel natural and grounded.

What drew me just as strongly to the Yoginis themselves was how unpolished and real they are, fierce, fragmented and contradictory, yet complete. I saw in them a language I already lived by so far - endurance without victimhood, power without permission, plurality without apology. My journey has been nonlinear and tested, and in that sense, this project felt like standing inside a lived truth. This orientation found immediate resonance in the artist’s decade-long engagement with the Yoginis. In this sense, the project operates not as an interpretation from a distance, but as a curatorial position embedded within lived reality.

My role as Curator and Cultural Strategist has been to articulate and frame the artist’s vision as an intellectual and cultural framework rather than a religious narrative. Ekaa – The One emerges from the artist’s ten-year practice and unfolds as an unprecedented 81-day, 16-state national travelling exhibition, conceived to take feminine heritage beyond elite art spaces and into wider public contexts. The project has received national recognition and intellectual support, grounding it in both cultural relevance and scholarly depth.

Ekaa – The One functions not merely as an art exhibition, but as a contemporary cultural movement. The Yoginis may be read through multiple intersecting lenses: as a feminist archive offering a pre-modern system aligned with decentralisation, embodied agency, and collective power; as ritual technology,where circular architectures encode cosmology, astronomy, and somatic knowledge; as a decolonial aesthetic disrupting inherited colonial taxonomies of “goddess,” “idol,” and “myth”; and as a contemporary political metaphor proposing leadership rooted in presence and inner sovereignty rather than domination.

The project's visual language is not devotional but a contemporary cultural proposition. It is reflective and discursive. Within this curatorial framework, the Yoginis may be read as a feminist archive, a system of embodied knowledge, a decolonial aesthetic, and a political metaphor for leadership rooted in presence rather than dominance. Each Yogini offers a space for dialogue, contemplation, and a reimagining of feminine power within today’s social and cultural landscape.