Artist-led, independent and 'small-scale' institutions come together for two years to contemplate the relevance and possibility of performance/live practices through a range of slow, consistent actions and conversations. They ask: How can we build frameworks in which one recognises and respects the individual rhythms of the other? How can we share models and frameworks? How can sustainability be ideas as well? We feel an urgency to rethink institutional structures, through artist-led collaborations, particularly in these times of unrest and contagion, where resources are scarce. We were struck by the ambition and pressure to create anew, instead of learning from our peers and sourcing from the immense labour & fertile material of each other's work - to embrace frugality as a method.
Online Performances
Since the beginning of 2022, HH Art Spaces in Goa, Galerie 3000 in Bern, Britto Arts Trusts in Dhaka and Theertha in Colombo have been in conversation with one another. Over this time - our rhythms have changed consistently with other institutional projects, fatigue, precarious funding and local programs. This was never a deterrent but a learning curve to adjust and work around the rhythms, schedules and needs of one another. Each of the projects that we developed as part of the Togather grant reflects a deep admiration and empathy for ideas and their development.
The transitions of the world and the complete moral bankruptcy of humanity and civil rights - over these two years have further complicated ideas of survival and freedom. Recent events in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and continued forms of dispossession and persecution in India continued to shape the project. Europe’s tryst with war and tenser immigration/asylum policies continue to other bodies seeking life and chance. As small scale art institutions our living is intrinsically tied to the precarity of the conditions we operate from but also correspond to similar conditions of aggression and oppression in other homelands of the world. An active board - a conversational diary - was maintained between all the participants and institutions where they journalled thoughts and forms, news and navigation over the weeks. This archive presents both non-linear and simultaneous time across borders and incidents. The dryness of geo-political terms and phrasing are warmed by lived experiences and inherited stories.
We are invested in open source and free to use curatorial and cultural frameworks. Conceptually, our research dwells on the radical possibility of bodies and its languages. There is no single way of extracting meaning and this was the cue for us to imagine this speculative project that brings together our knowledge to build an ecology of ideas, and blueprints. Keeping in mind the limitations emerging from the pandemic, and learning from the strategies citizen protests around the world have developed in the face of oppression - we approach performance through conditions like temperature, climate, “pull of the mother tongue”, missing/surrogate sounds (etc.) and processes such as creolization, migration, assimilation, and erasure. We prioritize orality, stories, song and muscle memory.
Year 1 - Year of Absence
✴︎
Year 2 - Year of Presence
✴︎
Year 1 - Year of Absence ✴︎ Year 2 - Year of Presence ✴︎
Project Diary
Project Diary
Previous Works
Debashish Paul
The river meets the sea
Charcoal on rice paper, earthen pots, and performance 1 hour ( Day I) & 40 minutes (Day II)
Kochi Muziris Biennale,
2022
Hemant Sreekumar
Godsignal
Godwin Gonstantine
Camouflage
Farah Naz Moon
Clap
Terrain Biennale
2018
Shubho O Saha
No Man's Land 1c
2014
Galerie 3000
Gossip reborn
Soloshow by Livio Casanova,
Lake Thun, Switzerland,
curated by Galerie 3000
Live Event
Body to Body, Breath to Breath is the final event emerging from the year of presence. All the artists or their representatives gather physically in Goa. After months of navigation time and space through each other, they now stage their ‘incidents’ in Aldona, a village in North Goa. Set alongside an old market, a former bank, HH Art Spaces and the street and fields - these presentations mark time on to space.
