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.
Artist Profiles:
© Shakir Gulzar
Lawai BemBem@Zentralwerk, Dresden
BemBem is an artist, translator, and writer. Her current exploration is life and lands in the ruins of capitalism and militarism. She works with a number of media and performance disciplines, hoping to find completely unexpected encounters that can shift and deepen her practice.
© Lawai BemBem
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 Abdulla
Nisha Abdulla@Schauburg, Munich
Nisha is a playwright and director based out of Bangalore. She began her artistic journey with writing shorts, as well as training and performing in Playback and Theatre of the Oppressed, followed by acting roles in both classical and devised productions. In the last few years, she has focused entirely on playwriting and direction.
© Nisha Abdulla
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 Bhide
Varsha Bhide@Experimental Radio, Munich
Varsha is an artist based in Bangalore. She studied visual arts from the College of Fine Arts, Bangalore and has specialised in painting. She has worked with varied and diverse media such as installation, performance, programming and print making, using different media and materials for each project.
© Varsha Bhide
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.
©Indu Antony
Vivek Muthuramalingam@whiteBOX, Munich
Vivek is a documentary photographer and artist based out of Bangalore, India. His practice is often multidisciplinary and involves writing, videography and multimedia.
© whiteBOX
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.
©Yash Bhandari
Yash Bhandari@Lichtenberg Studios, Berlin
Formally trained in sculpture, Yash
has explored performance art with 080 Loopholes Collective, explored sustainable architecture, farming and furniture design with SacredGroves at Auroville and has been a part of various citizen movements that have sharpened his creative agency.
© Yash Bhandari
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.
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