Of the 12 Indians artists who completed residencies in Germany as part of our bangaloREsidency-Expanded initiative, five will present insights into their enriching experience in Germany in this first Showcase. Each one of them has an interesting tale to tell - fresh perspectives, expanding horizons and new experiences, followed by a Q&A.
Yaang-Huuk-Uun: Confabulations is an augmented performance floor game, inviting audience members to step into a city which is an alphabet system which in turn is a mnemonic for different body parts. It maps bodies at different stages of assimilation, using the Meetei Mayek alphabet where each letter represents a body part. Meetei Mayek is the script of Meeteilon (Manipuri), an indigenous language spoken in Manipur. As a bangaloREsident-Expanded, BemBem developed the first iteration of this project at Zentralwerk in Dresden where she worked with the South-East Asian community of the city. She used a one-on-one performance methodology that she’s developed as part of her performance practice. A short live performance of Yaang-Huuk-Uun: Confabulations will be presented during the showcase.
Nisha's stint at Schauburg, made possible in cooperation with International Artist Residence Villa Waldberta, involved facilitating writing workshops with middle and senior school students, and writing a new play for young audiences. The play, Two Degrees, is a satirical take on the climate crisis - a student attempts to write a play for the school production to convince the adults watching that the impending climate crisis needs immediate action. At the showcase, Nisha and her group will be reading an excerpt from the play.
Varsha's project whilst at Experimantal Radio, A Symphony of Callouts, was about audio, particularly recordings from the street hawkers of Bangalore. The "callouts" which were organic all these years but are now being replaced by speakers, signify is a change in tradition. She was very inspired by the experimental music scene in Munich and the project took shape by remixing the callouts with experimental sounds. Alongside was an audio interactive video coded in Touch Designer, reacting like hair cells. A connection to how a street hawker associates a relationship with his customers.
During the course of his residency at whiteBOX in Munich, Vivek Muthuramalingam chose the theme of love and loss, threading together intimate memories and the landscape of Germany which formed the backdrop for many of them. He presented them as a series of photographs and poems, conceptualised in the format of a book tentatively titled, Poems for a Lost Love. He also set-up a darkroom at whiteBOX for producing ambrotypes, an alternative photographic process through which photographs are made on glass plates.
Inspired by the growing resistance against gentrification in the locality and among its inhabitants, the Camouflage Blocks that Yash made at Lichtenberg Studios were used as temporary public sculptures. They moved around in a performative, playful way in various forms and situations till blown apart by the wind or little pedestrians.
