BIOGRAPHY
Raised in Naarm/Melbourne and currently undertaking research and development in London, Devika Bilimoria (b. Fiji) courts an X-disciplinary practice of performance, dance, video, photography, sculpture, and installation to participating with notions of queering, time and materiality. They draw from practices of Bharatanatyam, Odissi, theatre, live art, and visual art, crossed with lived experiences of South Asian diaspora through queer, feminist, and ecological perspectives. Central to their practice is a concept of ‘body-ing’—formations of matter in perpetual movement , affecting and affected by forces of sociality, texture, pressure, light, and chance. With these more-than-human forces, Devika enlists chance-methods, duration and somatic listening as tools to agitate archived and encoded embodiments of separateness, hierarchies, and gestures across socio-cultural conditions. This is in care for slower and attuned ways of being.
Since the age of five Devika has trained in Bharatanatyam, and later Odissi, at the Chandrabhanu Bharatalaya Academy of Indian Dance in Melbourne, and has completed both a BA in Media Studies and Fine Arts (photography) at RMIT University, Melbourne. In 2022, Devika earned their Honours in Fine Arts (First Class) at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University, and was a recipient of the Rodger Davies Award for their durational performance installation, Offerings. In 2024 this work was subsequently performed in London as a part of ‘Ceremony [I]’, curated by Future Ritual.
On the continent cited as Australia, Devika has shown work at the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Australian Photography, Montsalvat Gallery and Dancehouse, amongst other national and international platforms. They are a one third of arts research collective L&NDLESS with Nithya Iyer and Luna Mrozik Gawler, one half of queer-time lab GEOFADE alongside Luna Mrozik Gawler, and was a 2021 Next Wave Kickstart recipient with Amias Hanley presenting Burial at Brunswick Mechanics Institute. In 2022, Devika was a part of the International Photography Festival PHOTO, exhibiting work in A Bell Rings Over The Valley, curated by Shivanjani Lal.
They were selected for the Performance Space and Critical Path Experimental Choreographic Residency in 2023 on Gadigal country/Sydney. And, in 2024 Devika was selected amongst other artists for On Duration, a month-long residency at Central Negra, Spain, through AADK curated by Dr Raegan Truax.
Contact Devika for exhibitions, group shows, art commissions and professional photography services at info@devikabilimoria.com.
I acknowledge the traditional custodians of where I have grown and am connected to. I pay my respects to the peoples of the Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung language groups of the Kulin Nations - elders past, present and emerging. The sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has never been ceded.