OFFERINGS, 2022/23
DEBUT XIXBlindside Gallery, VIC
29 Mar–22 Apr 2023
Ramak Bamzar, Devika Bilimoria, Christy Chudosnik, Hugh Crowley, Jordan Koudmani, WooJai Lee, Ming Liew, Katie Paine, Michelle Tonkin
Instigated by pouring, bowing, throwing and placing, Offerings merges shared gestures across chance methods of art-making and ritual worship into an accumulative performance installation that sees an assemblage of raw materials on a voided floor space for a prescribed duration. The work is choreographed by a game of dice that generates countless seven-word 'offering scores', where Devika successively offers a singular material substance with their body into the void. In this work, the materials and gestures are prompted by Devika's elapsed experiences of the Hindu worshipping ritual, pūja, but are also of a quotidian and sanctified register.
Stimulated by randomisation, this chance-based performance is an experimental practice of indeterminacy, play and disorientation. It attempts to commune with the porous haunt of embodied intra-cultural inscriptions, matter and entangled lineages with sincerity, sometimes absurd.
To see more of this project visit DEBUT XIX.
To hear more about Offerings listen to this RRR radio with Devika and Priya Namana interviewed by Samira Farah.
