Untitled (work in transience), 2022






HD Video, Colour, silent, 9’20’’
This work in transience/work in progress was presented as a large scale projection in ARTICUALTIONS curated by Priya Namana from the Centre For Projection Art in 2022, 11-12 March.

As part of Melbourne Fashion Festival's Independent Program, Centre for Projection Art are activating the public spaces around Collingwood Yards, showcasing video works by artists Amrita Hepi, Zoë Bastin and Devika Billimoria. Articulating notions of place, identity, archive and gesture held by the body, these lens-based works express their intentions through the language of movement and gesture.

To frame the presentation of these projection works was a panel in conversation unpacking the ideas, motivations and approaches within the shared language of their practices with Scotty So, Eugenia Lim and Jody Haines.

ARTICULATIONS II - Bodies carve out space, adapt to environmental conditions, and hold deep relational connections to landscape, cultural experiences and lived histories. Embodying, learning, and feeling, the body communicates these relations through perpetual movement and gesture. This talk will engage with the language and connections that a body as a medium forms and expresses through. 

This video work is an exercise in temporal weaving, relational gestures and ephemeral elongation from site responsive choreographies recorded within a static frame. Practiced at Koonya Beach on Boon Wurrung Country in so-called Australia, this work emphasises the inextricable interconnectedness of earth and body whilst inciting troubles of territory, the 'human', migration, and identification through inverted forms. It belongs to a series of body/earth movement explorations of somatic listening and improvisational response, where I attempt to embody sites that I momentarily encounter to elongate my experience and understanding of that site and its materials. My digitally multiplied body amid temporalities of sandstone and sky evokes a charged nexus of body/earth, nature/culture and ingestion/projection, where a inversion elicits a tension in the notion of an edge. The choreography begins and ends with a short movement sequence that pays homage to the earth, known as Namaskaram, from my training in a South Indian dance form Bharatanatayam . Throughout, the body shifts between deep-time listening postures and improvised movement with sensorial attention.






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