Offerings, 2025
Image: Fenia Kotsopoulou
THE LONDON OPEN LIVE
Whitechapel Gallery, London
Gallery 2 | 5 Jun, 4-8pm | 6 & 7 Jun, 1-5pm
Offerings was selected from 394 applicants as one of 15 artists for Whitechapel Gallery’s historic London Open program (running since 1932), which took place from June to September 2025. This year’s theme is Live Practice.
Offerings opens the three-month program, alongside stellar company including: Season Butler, Shaun Caton, Helen Davison, Tim Etchells, Plastique Fantastique, Helena Goldwater, i.as.in.we, William Mackrell, Nando Messias, Will Pegna, Roshana Rubin-Mayhew, Mahsa Salali, Aaron Williamson + Joshua Woolford. See performance schedule here.
EXHIBITION TEXT
Structured as a game of dice, Offerings presents a durational performance installation that activates ritual, chance, and cultural memory in an enquiry of diaspora, socio-cultural hierarchies, and metaphysical frameworks.
The work follows on from the artist's choreographic investigation of symbolic, mechanical, quotidian and prescribed gestures. Through Devika Bilimoria’s research they have identified four gestures of offering—pouring, throwing, bowing, and placing—which are used across global ritual practices and chance methods of art making from Dada to Fluxus art movements. By enlisting randomisation via a game of dice, Offerings collapses these gestures in an arena of indeterminacy, jumbling attributes of ritualised and the everyday, such as vocalisation, posture and material.
In live action, the artist combines repetition, endurance, improvisation, and text scores with historical experiences of pūjā: the devotional offering of flowers, food, and sacred powders found in Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions. Mediated by randomness, Offerings reconfigures this practice into an experimental and indeterminate encounter, where the body and materials engage in unexpected and expansive relations.
Across three days of 4-hour performances for The London Open Live, the artist will perpetually generate seven-word instructional ‘offering scores’ randomised from seven categories by the roll of dice to be improvised as unpredictable task-based choreographies. These scores instruct the artist to release materials, such as rice, ghee, milk, flowers, fruit, money, red kumkum power and honey into a demarcated zone, a void, building an accumulative, shifting assemblage of formless matter, resonating with sonic and physical traces from their actions.
For Bilimoria, randomisation acts as a tool for queering internalised socio-cultural, material, and anatomical hierarchies, allowing for the emergence of unforeseen expressions and haunted temporalities. By employing randomisation as a generative force, Offerings seeks to agitate inherited cultural artefacts, embodied lineages and territories of the sacred, everyday and hegemonic—unsettling fixed cultural meanings and binaries.
In this unpredictable game of chance and ritual, Offerings proposes a critical exploration of purity, power and agency from dominant ideologies that hinder alternate ways of sensing and becoming.
Image: Amias Hanley
Detail Image: Devika Bilimoria
Image: Amias Hanley
Image: Amias HanleyImage: Amias HanleyImage: Fenia KotsopoulouImage: Fenia KotsopoulouImage: Fenia KotsopoulouImage: Fenia KotsopoulouImage: Fenia KotsopoulouImage: Amias Hanley
Image: Devika Bilimoria
Image: Devika Bilimoria