Sound Art

Sound Artist / LIVE Scoring

Cobalt as the midnight sky
when day has gone without a trace
and we lie in each other’s arms
eyes shut and fingers open
and all the colors of the world
pass through our bodies like strings of fire.
-Marge Piercy

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.

Performed by Namrata, Simran, Karan
Live music by Baan G

Sound Artist

The third edition of the Norient City Sounds series is moored in Delhi, India, as it tunes in to a polyphony of voices, songs, sounds, and narratives that reimagine and unconceal the various worlds and characters constituting the capital’s sonicities. NCS Delhi unpacks and complicates the notion of the city by scattering it into its many cities with their colliding histories, rhythms, tales, and desires. Through a collection of sound pieces, texts, films, photo-essays, conversations, graphic artworks, and more, #DelhiSensate evokes the deeply layered and composite sensorium of a city that both senses and is sensed in a multitude of ways. Curated by Suvani Suri, a Delhi-based artist and researcher.

*Find the entire series here – https://norient.com/delhi-sensate

* Composer / Producer / Sound Designer / Mix & Mastering Engineer of my piece titled ‘Thotha Gyaan Pagharo‘. Image mashup by Anant Raina

Curator

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 Exhibit

Safarnama

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.

Original sound design and audio mixing by Mudeebakery; Immersive (two channel) sound design at Khoj Studios by Baan G. Music played by Taj Mohammad and Abdul Hameed Baloch. Wall Illustration at Khoj Studios by Mohd. Intiyaz Ansari. Commissioned and produced by Khoj International Artists’ Association and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary for st_age.

Audio Stories