PERFORMANCEOfferings, 2024
Offerings, 2023
Offerings, 2022
ALAKKALA, 2019
H:O:M:E, 2018
Mokita, 2017
MOVING IMAGEUntitled 02, 2022
Untitled, 2022
INTERWORLD, 2021
smooth-time, 2020
Portal of Possibilities, 2020
A Utah Time Signature, 2019
Book of Dream, 2018
A Los Angeles Time Signature, 2018
An Arctic Time Signature, 2015
INSTALLATIONBurial, 2023
Murti, 2018
The Moving Image, 2017
PHOTOGRAPHYDiosma, 2020
Territory of Darkness, 2020
Werebodies, 2020
Pool Hall, 2017
Walking In My Shoes (Ondru), 2018
Yumarrala Ngulu (Ondru), 2018
They Are Climbing Mt Asgard, 2014
Discs, 2014
Distant, Relative, 2013
Voiceless Journeys (Ondru), 2012
Allery Exhibitions, 2008
DRAWINGS
Dry Yellow, 2020
Dry Red, 2020
Dry Blue, 2018-20
info@devikabilimoria.com
©2024 Devika Bilimoria Offerings, 2024
Image: Fenia Kotsopoulo
54 offerings over a continuous 6 hour duration.
CEREMONY [I], presented by Future Ritual
Safehouse 1 + 2, London
23 June 2024
Marilyn Arsem, Sandra Johnston, Helena Goldwater and Devika Bilimoria
On the midsummer weekend, Future Ritual presented CEREMONY [I], a day of durational performances in a pair of dilapidated Victorian houses in South East London. Slow actions by artists unfolded in long form performances evocative of memory, decay, and endurance. As the year turned, we invited long breaths, attuning with these old spaces, and inviting reflection and connection.
This third iteration Offerings is a six hour durational performance installation articulated as a ritual-like game of dice played live by the artist that generates unpredictable choreographic offering-scores of worshipping materials into a demarcated void. What emerges is an evolving floor-based accumulation of milk, honey, ghee, red kumkum powder, rice, flowers, fruits, sound and gesture in a formless assemblage. And the addition of money.
Instigated by pouring, throwing, bowing, and placing, as gestures identified across global ritual practices and chance methods from Dada to Fluxus movements, this game of indeterminacy references the artist’s historic experience with materials and choreographies from a Hindu ritual practice known as pūjā. Broadly, pūjā is an idol-oriented offering practice of flowers, foods, adornments, and light, accompanied by recitation. It’s form is scaled; from quick to elongated, at home or in a temple, alone or as a group. The physical actions of pūjā, and its access, vary depending on occasion, deity, caste, gender and location.
Merging a game of dice with existing experiences of ritual structures, Offerings uses randomisation as a research method to agitate what is given as a process for queering embodied social, material, and anatomical hierarchies.
Conceptually, Offerings explores indeterminacy and suspension by enlisting randomisation with improvisation as a practice-led research method to agitate socio-cultural orders, hierarchies, and cultural artefacts archived in the body. Randomisation is used as a re-ordering tool by the artist as an experimental approach to queering embodied inscriptions within a diasporic framework - to reimagine what is given. It is a critical exploration of power, agency and hybridity from ideologies that hinder alternate possibilities of sensing and becoming.
The randomised offering-scores both reveal and collapse demarcations of quotidian and sanctified gestures and cultural artefacts archived within the artist's body, such as lyrics from the radio and mantras. In this way, randomisation becomes a conduit to the haunt of intra-cultural inscriptions and entangled lineages of cultural (re)production. The absurdity afforded by randomisation is brought to witness in a performance of live re-inscription witnessed by viewers through a game of chance and endurance, a perpetual body-ing.
WATCH highlights and read more about CEREMONY [I]
Image: Devika Bilimoria
Image: Devika Bilimoria
Image: Amias Hanley
Image: Fenia Kotsopoulou
Image: Devika Bilimoria
Image: Fenia Kotsopoulou
Image: Devika Bilimoria
Image: Devika Bilimoria
Image: Devika Bilimoria
Image: Amias Hanley
Image: Amias Hanley
Image: Amias Hanley
Image: Amias Hanley