Dancing Girl

When you sound, what you hear is the landscape sounding back at you. Humkalam. In this piece Humkalam is used to imagine the fluidity of perceived objective historical account, and to reimagine the stories around the Indus river and Indus Valley civilisation. If the observer's gaze creates a certain spectacle, out of unearthed materials and technologies, tied to sociopolitical motivations, can it be said that no history, land or people, through region, through time, are memorialised the same? The Dancing Girl is an (in)famous sculpture that represents a liberated, iconoclastic, adavasi through one lens, and a metaphor for enabling institutional caste and religious violence through another. Various materials from the Harappan peoples harken to similar contextualisation.

The Indus river's ebb and flow serves as the pulmonary vein of Pakistan's rich ecology. The devastating battering that this land and its inhabitants experienced in the 2022 floods only opened up a new chapter in a long history of brutalities meted out by an extractivist, neo-colonial state drunk on development. Yet in 'The Invention of Rivers', Dilip Dacunha envisions these aquatic forms as not bounded and discrete bodies, not lines in the sand, but as a ubiquitous wetness: ambient, material and immaterial, seen and unseen. It is this dynaminism which motivates the rejection of objective, simplified history, in the hopes of deepening our union with water, through the re-contextualisation of the Harappan civilisation's tale,

As part of an offering as a comissioned artist for the Temporary Artists Anonymous exhibition I created a multimedia physical exhibition with an accompanying 3D moving-image, the latter of which serves as cultural mythmaking within the context of Audre Lorde's bio-mythification, resulting in a poesis in the digitisation field from the merging of theory, narrative, animation and accessible scanning and modelling practices built on reclaiming stolen spiritual objects residing in private collections and museums. To bring love and humanity back to these spiritual objects an animation workflow in relation to 3-D scanned and/or extrapolated 2-D materials was created, in which the perceived are in autonomy through imagination and Humkalam. This technique, called 'Archival Movement', will be taught through workshops to the public for free in collaboration with Bristol Digital Futures Institute in late 2024.