What shall we remember to forget to remember to rematerialize?
কাল্পনিক রেখা / Kalponik Rekha / Imaginary Terrains
Date: 25.03.2023
Doors: 19:30
Event time: 20:00 - 22:00
Location: iii workspace
City: The Hague
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কাল্পনিক রেখা / Kalponik Rekha / Imaginary Terrains invites South Asian artists and researchers to collect and compose thoughts and memories of an unclear dissection of the subcontinent:
of relics of an erased history, of the pencil that scattered the soil, of the soil that dissolved our grandmothers grave into the river, of the river that cries when the মেছা ভূত (mechhobhoot) arrives, of longing for the whispers that lie in the trunk of the lace-fita hawker.
19:30 – Doors Open
20:00 – Fileona Dkhar, Secular Prayer to a Canary in a Coalmine, Performance
20:30 – Sandipan Nath and Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Data Tone, Performance
Break
21:00 – Puer Deorum, The Circuit before the Long Distance Future, Performance
21:30 – Artist Talk, Shadman & Artists
Puer Deorum presents a new introspective performance work reconfiguring time and infinities, re-contextualising and resurfacing South Asian histories, interplaying them with mythology, mysticism and folklore. Exploring an omnipresent sense of longing, rooted within an embodiment of superposition, ~through~ sound, movement and (s)pace; Creating altered realities with familiar, yet accentuated symbolism, an invitation to play with the esoteric, where the orientalised transcend beyond (post)colonial perception.
Creating cycles of movement and visions, distorted mirrors of earthly patterns. Refracting, retracing, rekindling memories, blurred like the recounting of a lucid dream of which the narrative was dug up from the subconscious mind. Slow but ephemeral like the transition of the sun over the shore disappearing before we know it, while we gaze out onto the horizon.
Sandipan Nath & Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Sandipan is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher focusing on questions of agency, community, language and listening at the intersection of socio-political discourses and ecological (re)thinking. His current practice builds on theoretical research while developing narrative tools that contextualise and criticise the dynamics and boundaries between humans, technology, nature and non-human objects.
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a contemporary artist, researcher, writer and theorist. Working across diverse media, such as sound, text, and moving image, and incorporating various technologies such as sensors, AI, and Machine Learning. Chattopadhyay produces large-scale installations and live performance addressing urgent issues such as the climate crisis, human intervention in the environment and ecology, migration, race, and decoloniality.
In this audiovisual performance, Sandipan and Budhaditya offer a playful and innovative engagement with archives as they explore our current understanding of life through the lens of computational systems and the ways in which these systems encode discrimination and bias. Through a dynamic blend of sound, visual, and interactive elements, the artists challenge audiences to consider the ways in which these biases are perpetuated and the potential consequences of these narratives on marginalised communities. Using archival materials in a creative and unexpected way, the performance invites audiences to actively engage with the past and call for a more democratic future.
Fileona is a lens-based artist and researcher influenced by varying dimensions of thought, form and discipline. These kaleidoscopic interests stem from her roots as an indigenous woman. This position maps out her visual arts practice. Working with themes of ecology, identity and mythology, her work desires to (borrowing words from Trinh T. Minh-ha,) not “speak about identity” but “to speak nearby.”
‘Secular Prayer to a Canary in a Coalmine’ – is a spoken word performance around an altar of cyanotype prints and cave drawings. Each print has a woofer attached which plays subtle sounds from caves: manmade (the noise of extraction), canaries, fire crackle (ancient cave animation) and echoes. The audio transforms the prints into stalagmites of cave-like sound. Aristotle believed the earth’s organs were represented in the caves underneath acting as a stomach. The Mawmluh Caves, in Fileona’s home state, are a site of exploration, history and also limestone mining.
Shadman Shahid is a photographer born and raised in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. His work is about the precarity of the corporeal and the spiritual human conditions in contemporary society. His photographic methodology straddles the line between documentary and fiction. He is currently based in the Netherlands, and is responsible as the Head of the Department of MA Photography and Society, at the Royal Academy of Art in Hague. Prior to moving to the Netherlands, he was a lecturer at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute.
The evening will end with a discussion between Shadman Shahid, and the artists, reflecting on archaic concepts of imaginary trajectories, the state of displacement, the solidified sound of our communal turbulence, and the perennial desire that crawls in the distance.
Avita Maheen – Curator
Interdisciplinary artist, curator, writer, filmmaker and researcher, born in Bangladesh and now based in The Netherlands. Her work develops sensory installations and non linear narratives, to craft a moment, with autoethnographic research and anecdotal archive.
কাল্পনিক রেখা/ Kalponik Rekha / Imaginary Terrains is presented by iii with financial support from Creative Industries Fund NL and The Municipality of The Hague.
