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SHARE THE LOVE was a city-wide interactive art exhibition, running for the 22-day duration of the Pan Am & ParaPan Am Games to celebrate the spirit of the games.
The CYOA Rhythms video installation was presented as part of the IGNITE exhibition series. Commissioned by the City of Mississauga (a Toronto satellite city), the installation was shown on the 28′ x 16′ screens @ Mississauga’s Celebration Square on Aug 3 & 10 @ 9am-9pm.
Hosted by the Art Gallery of Mississauga, an artist talk on ‘ideas of cultural citizenship’ was held on Jul 27 @12-1pm via Twitter chat, using hashtag #sharethelovesauga.
The video installation, CYOA Rhythms, was included in the New Media Program of the 2014 Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival.
CYOA Rhythms encapsulates the vantage point to my personal-cultural experience in the Caribbean sits at an intersection where Africa, Europe and South Asia (unintentionally) became a bridge between these regions historically. Despite differences in nationality and development, the linguistic, ethnic/ cultural divisions in the Caribbean remain more meaningful than national divisions.
The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival is currently the largest film Festival in the English Caribbean. It is 2 weeks in length, international in scope and showcases feature, narrative, documentary, short and experimental films from the English, French, Spanish, Dutch Caribbean and the region's diaspora.
Part of a larger global education project, Batala New York is a community platform for music education, cultural integration community interaction. Comprised solely of women, the drumming ensemble plays music commonly heard in the streets of Salvador de Bahia in northeastern Brazil.
The Carnival Project was the organization's inaugural annual event, reinterpreting New World 'carnival' themes through a contemporary fusion of samba-reggae, 50 batala drummers, bagpipers, New Orleans brass and my video installation, CYOA Rhythms.
The event was held at Littlefield, an eco-bar/ performance space located in the still-emerging Gowanus neighbourhood of Brooklyn. Housed in an old warehouse from the 1920s, the space merges Gowanus' industrial past with an eco-friendly future, serving as a beacon of sustainability for further neighbourhood rejuvenation.
Included in the funding received for this exhibition was a research component to understand how the organization was structured, in support of their efforts to become a platform for music education, cultural promotion, community integration and interaction — while being a symbol for women’s empowerment. The grant enabled in-depth conversations surrounding the needs of a community drumming ensemble in its early years — management of on-going rehearsals and performances, transience in rental space (due to the band’s ‘noise pollution’), facilitating collaboration with other bands/ artists and Batala ensembles internationally, and building revenue streams for space, training, drums, etc.
"Confessions of an Insomniac," a site-specific installation concept proposed for the decaying Dara Shikoh Library (New Delhi), was included in theINSERT2014 (New Delhi) exhibition and symposium's New Models for Common Ground research cell. The proposed installation space, an unused historical building (with a storied royal familial history), where differences in architectural design of the interior (Mughal empire)and exterior (British empire) were evident in the details - denoting a period between eras characterized by uncertainty, the abandoning of existing structures, change and innovation. The installation concept explored psychoanalytic themes of inherited legacy and human change processes, juxtaposed with contemporary issues of media fatigue and self-commodification.
Designed to be a constellation of conversations, the INSERT2014 exhibition and symposium was an attempt to renew focus on the artist as a generator of ideas— examining the social, cultural and geopolitical role of an artist in redefining cultural infrastructure in New Delhi.
The month-long event was billed in the media as an intellectual contrast to the overly commercial India Art Fair running concurrently. INSERT2014 garnered an audience of 10,000 people and cut across a swathe of artist, academic, government/ public sector and diplomatic circles in New Delhi.
Sarai 09: Projections took the form of a 9-month exhibition (Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi) and a collection of published writings (Sarai-09 Reader). The event proposed projections as an “an incandescent transference – some crossing of a void to effect luminous landings on a distant surface. Without projections we would have no cinema, no city plans, no forecasts, no wagers, no fantasies. Projections convect questions, magnify dreams and illuminate desires.”
I contributed an essay to the reader entitled, Taking Flight: Perspectives from the Depths of an Ideas Factory. The work explores the life of an idea across an ad agency, a social movement and a war zone.The exhibition and reader were developed by Sarai– the media arm of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS, New Delhi). The exhibition was located in proximity to a technology hub and garnered a diverse audience of academics, artists, commercial ‘tech geeks’ and researchers in New Delhi. The Sarai 09: Reader garnered a large international readership across a similar audience of cultural diverse academics, artists and researchers.
The Sarai Readers were published once a year. Projections is the 9th volume of a 9 volume series. Each issue was structured around a specific theme and invited writing by practitioners, academics, activists and artists from diverse fields.
