A live performer assumes the audience is present to be taken on a journey into another dimension, to be suspended in dis-belief for a moment, to be stirred into deep personal questioning by embodied acts with movements, vocalizations, gestures, postures and stillness. The photographer documenting it is challenged to create an image that captures the gestalt and subtle mood, and deliver a sustained, heightened embodied memory of the live art work to sit in an archive, an evocative record in its afterlife. Déjà vu, explores this dialogue between performer and photographer.
Photographed by Shivani Gupta, it is a narrative of our collective project - to create a community for interdisciplinary live art and performance practices - to investigate processes and tools articulated by practitioners, towards a vocabulary and a critical pedagogy of the form.
It is a selection of all the performances which featured Masks as costume accessory or performance prop. The mask is a veil, a symbol, an altered ego, and a way for the performer to be ‘inside the pocket’, often driving the performance trajectory forward. Masking, unmasking, revealing and unveiling, turning something inside-out, invoking spirits and evoking emotions through absurd hybridizations of self, second skin, and contagion or contamination are explored in this exhibition.
These are poignant residual effects, marking evidence of what happened, surviving the ephemeral creations by live artists - a way to remember the future.
Shivani Gupta’s (b. 1984) practice uses photography to texture and layer circumstances and encounters. These extend to performances staged for the camera, as well as through the documentation of live art. She proposes the camera is an agent of personal and cultural storytelling in the distance between the mythical, the staged and our many perceived realities. Photography in her work is used to excavate the magic of places and their people to explore and present a reality that is not within the framework of the banal. She tends to privilege the visual over the performative, beginning from the interiorities of the body and moving to the exterior through her camera.
Left - How to live together ?, HH x Pro Helvetia, 2023 | Right - Undercover Waltz : The Tablecloth Tango, HH Art Spaces, 2023
Left - Sensorium, HH x Sunaparanta ,2015 | Right - Ground beneath my feet, HH x Serendipity Arts Festival, 2019
Installation Shot
Left - Where do we stand now ?, HH x Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2022 | Right - Where do we stand now ?, HH x Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2022
Left - Ground beneath my feet, HH x Serendipity Arts Festival, 2019 | Middle - Concrete Skies, HH x Serendipity Arts Festival, 2019 | Right - Interpreting Sol Lewitt #797, Sunaparanta, 2023
Left - Interpreting Sol Lewitt #797, Sunaparanta, 2023 | Right - Concrete Skies, HH x Serendipity Arts Festival, 2019
Sensorium, HH x Sunaparanta, 2015
Left - Concrete Skies, HH x Serendipity Arts Festival, 2019 | Right - Ground Beneath My Feet, HH x Serendipity Arts Festival, 2017