DEVIKA BILIMORIA

UNTITLED 02, 2022

HD Video, colour, silent, 9'50"

Artists: Ashfika Rahman (Bangladesh), Indu Antony (India), Sheelasha Rajbhandari (Nepal), Devika Bilimoria (Australia), Shwe Wutt Hmon (Myanmar).

A bell rings out across the valley.
A deep resonance that begins in the Himalayas and echoes out across the Bay of Bengal. Growing in vibration and meaning as it sings out. Complex and tender, a many headed figure forms. Both of alarm and joy. Photography’s roots here can be traced to empire, anthropology and journalism. The region takes these roots and shape shifts these understandings and new stories form. What does Contemporary Photography look like in South Asia? What stories are being told? Five artists have been invited from across South Asia and its Diaspora to speak of complex experiences of identity, heritage and change.

Created on the unceded lands of the Boon Wurrung, on the east shore of Port Phillip Bay, south of Melbourne, this work intends to incite interrelations of territory, migration and ecology through site responsive movement and the visual technique of inversion.
Continuing from a body-earth exploration that began in 2014, the video works I make arise from the desire to attune to and further understand more-than-human bodies, multiple temporalities and environments through somatic listening to trouble the narratives of edges that separate us from our embedded experience within the world. This practice is an exercise in temporal weaving, relational gestures and ephemeral elongation made from site responsive interactions recorded within a static frame then choreographed in the editing suite.
The shifting tidal edge is always already becoming explicit and implicit, enfolding consumptions of co-dependency and indeterminacy - where does the body begin and end? This piece is a meditation on the inside/outside aporia of the body in relation to the question of what constitutes the 'human', diasporic experiences, and hybridity.