Opening Night
Fri 8 Aug, 5 – 8pm

Free, RSVP here

Naina Sen, Darwin Festival, and Qubit Gallery would love for you to join us this August for the world premiere of সুন্দরী /Shundori. Meet the artist and be one of the first to view this extraordinary multi-projection, multi-channel, multi-lingual video installation that will turn the walls of the gallery into an immersive portal.

Artist Talk
Sat 9 Aug, 12 – 1pm

Free, Registration required

Join artists Naina Sen and visiting artists Jyotsna Siddharth (Delhi, India) and Aarti Jadu (Naarm) for an informal talk about the origins of সুন্দরী /Shundori, an incredibly personal and important body of work.

URBAN KALI: A durational performance by Rakini Devi
Thur 14th Aug, 4.30 – 6.30pm

Audiences can choose to stay or leave anytime during the two-hour performance.

Rakini Devi’s durational performance of Urban Kali explores the sensory dimensions of the body’s narrative that focuses on the female form as ritual and artefact. Her approach to performing Kali iconography reconstructs sacred female iconography through her interrogation of contemporary constructs of female identity.

Devi situates Kali iconography within a secular urban landscape, drawing on three decades of performances and research, including her doctoral thesis titled Urban Kali from sacred dance to secular performance, 2018.

The Bengali Goddess Kali’s reputation for inciting terror and love, and as the destroyer of time – or Kala, aligns with Devi’s performance activism that protests global misogyny, colonialism, and racism. The performance is also a personal reclamation from the relentless cultural appropriation of Kali iconography by Western feminism and commercialisation.

During the two-hour performance, Devi embodies Kali iconography by distilling her knowledge of two forms of Indian classical dance, Bharatanatyam and Odissi, using costume, gesture, actions, and props. She draws on her lived experience of Kali puja pandals (roadside temporary shrines) in her birth city of Kolkata.

The artist requests that taking selfies with her during the durational performance is strictly forbidden.

Artist Bio

Sydney based Dr. Rakini Devi is an Australian performance and visual artist with an Indian-Burmese heritage. Devi integrates her knowledge of Indian Classical and contemporary dance, painting, writing and live art. She describes her performance practice as a predominantly visual art practice. Her work has a gendered inflection in that it investigates female iconography represented in both sacred and secular contexts in relation to modern society, using hybrid religious female iconography that protests global misogynist atrocities.

BODY AS A CASTE FIELD
A movement work by Jyotsna Siddharth
With a live score by Aarti Jadu
Sat 16th Aug, 12-1pm

Free, Registration required

‘Body as a Caste Field’ is an exploratory performative work that showcases a queer, marginalised, Dalit body’s socio-political, geographical location and its navigations within the systemic oppression in South Asia and globally.

In this performance, I work with my body as a tool to create a web with Janeu (a ‘sacred’ thread worn by upper caste Hindu men, that signals the pervasive practices of brahmanical patriarchy) and other threads and wire. This web is a symbolic, invisible caste line that creates divisions and segregation in South Asian society. With/in the web, I play, dominate, subvert, disrupt, submit and pause to engage with the dark space within one’s body and tap into the embodied material of caste, intergenerational load of pain and collective trauma. This performance explores the duality of body navigating caste field tapping into the history of systemic oppression to achieve intimacy, power over one’s own body, ideas and life choices.

This performance will be accompanied by a live score by sound artist and musician Aarti Jadu which will be the outcome of both artists collaborating in a creative lab, responding to the Shundori Installation in-situ.

Artist Bios

Jyotsna Siddharth (She/They) is an artist, actor, theatre maker and writer. Jyotsna’s practice spreads across institutional building, intersectionality, arts, activism, theatre, films and development. They have been supporting and advising several organisations, art and social collectives, on strengthening gender, anti-caste, queer, minority rights perspectives in India and other countries.

In 2023, Jyotsna has made history by launching a self-written and produced play in Delhi called ‘Clay’. The play sold out five shows in less than two days being the only play with an intersectional cast and crew produced by a Dalit Queer woman. Jyotsna is also part of Ava Duvernay’s much acclaimed film ‘Origin’, which received a nine minute standing ovation at Venice Film Festival and TIFF 2023.

‘Body as a Caste Field ’ premiered at Documenta Fifteen (2022) in Kassel, Germany as part of Party Office. It has since been shown at May Day Cafe in Delhi earlier this year.

Aarti Jadu composes cinematic, atmospheric pieces played live through electronic and acoustic instrumentation. Her works, often featuring effected vocals and synthesizers, idiosyncratically connect the disparate; organic and digital, modern and timeless, hard and soft; to underscore the significance of communal folk music for societal wellness, a musical value derives from Aarti’s spiritual and cultural upbringing.

Aarti’s practice is concerned with the way in which the intimate and wider community engage with sound. From community workshops to cross disciplinary and ensemble performance, sound design and public art, she rarely ceases to agitate the conventions of ‘music’ and ‘performance’ to facilitate group sonic experiences sensitive to environment, intention and story.”

A Conversation with Naina Sen
Sat 23rd Aug, 12-1pm

Join us for an in-depth artist talk about the five year journey of the making of সুন্দরী / Shundori and video artist and filmmaker Naina Sen’s interdisciplinary, expanded cinema practice. Followed by a final exhibition walk through with Naina as she takes audiences through the genesis and stories behind some of the video works.

Free, Registration required