Sound Artist / LIVE Scoring

To live inside a poem, in its continuance.

Fragments of unfinished verses swirl in an orbit, finding their way to each other, bewitched. They dance for a while, hand in hand, and then drop to the ground- to catch a breath, a smile, a moment in time; to sit together. Content. Then they get up to dance again before they say their goodbyes.

Images from the past, present and future, all collide to construct wild imaginations. Colors form, hide and show. Pass through images, like shadows of clouds. Fleeting. They meet each other in dark alleys, and kiss, and melt. Like a flirt with the mysticism of cinema. It’s a film made in the moment, an image at a time. Where bodies constructing the visuals are as much the performance as the images themselves. Cinema expands, perception transforms, colours dissolve – what all can a film be.

With this expanded cinema performance, the intent is to break form, and to just simply, play or dance. To stay in the moment and to transcend with its passing. To arrive in transition. With three 16mm projectors and projectionists as live performers, we enter worlds of visual juxtapositions, photo chemical experiments and engage with the mediums of theatre, mechanics and chemistry.

Co-Curated the ‘Raqs-O-Mausiqi’ exhibit for the Mahindra Sanatkada Festival 2023, with Purva Naresh and Oroon Das.

• Setup: Arduino and Makey Makey chips to trigger sounds at the ‘Ghosts of Tawaifs’ (Courtesan performers and singers) zone.
• ‘Chladni plate’: to depict the ‘Riyaaz’ (practice).
• Recorded, produced and sampled audio for various individual multi-media zones, integrating them with live performances.

Sound Design | Immersive audio installation at KHOJ Studios

Does the Blue Sky Lie? is opening at KHOJ Studios, April 27th—6:30 pm onwards. stop by ~

Safarnama (2020)

A sound piece tracing the textures and toxicities of air, which is being shown as an installation for the first time.

Invoking the presence of jinns to explore the textures and toxicities of air, Safarnama activates natural and sacred worlds to pay attention to the intimacy of toxic colonialisms. Borrowing its name from and referencing the history of travel literature produced in the Islamic world, Safarnama traces the journey of a jinn traveling through the emerging, extractive infrastructures of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. We turn to these otherworldly beings of air and fire to disrupt colonial protocols of seeing and knowing, to rewire our experiential modes, and to stretch open the possibility of witnessing at a time of heightened policing and repression. The jinn that we seek challenges the state project of erasure. Subsisting below the threshold of official state narratives, the jinn attunes us to the entanglements between sacred, human, and ecological worlds.