Jun 14 2024 to Jun 16 2024 11 a.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Exhibition Opening: Friday, 14 June, 11:00 am Timings: Friday, 14 June | 11:00 am – 8:00 pm Saturday, 15 June | 11:00 am – 5:00 pm Sunday, 16 June | 11:00 am – 8:00 pm Performance: Saturday, 15 June | 7:00 pm

INHERITAGE, conceived and created by choreographer Preethi Athreya, is a performance installation that traces a relationship with objects inherited, passed on or lost. Through a choreographic lens, it looks at objects that speak to a cultural and colonial heritage, embodying critical questions of our attachment to ‘belongings’, to the idea of ‘belonging’ and to place. The installation presents a personal collection of thirteen objects inherited, owned, acquired or lost to bring out a history of their transactions beyond ownership, origin and identity. How can the act of looking, touching or holding these objects be a way to ‘read’ them? The objects are displayed as photographic images. Scan the QR codes on each image to listen to an account of their journeys. These writings, in turn, find their way into the body in a dance film that accompanies the images. Interrupting this assembly of image, sound and film is periodical live movement that punctuates the tableau. Performance: ‘how are things …?’ Saturday, 15 June | 7:00 pm ‘how are things …?’ is a 50 minute solo performance within the context of the performance installation INHERITAGE by choreographer Preethi Athreya. Through a development of text, movement and sound, Preethi presents a personal ‘archaeology’ of objects inherited, passed on or lost. By tracing the journey of things into our lives, she asks – can we make an anatomical, speculative fiction of objects? Can we trace ‘her-stories’ (and not totalising and reductive ‘his’tories) of objects found not in the museum, but in our family homes, that have written us into being …? INHERITAGE was produced by the CHARCOAL platform for collaboration with support from Prakriti Foundation and the Alliance Française of Madras. 

Artiste

Preethi Athreya Dancer & Artist

A Chennai-based contemporary dancer, Preethi Athreya (1976) trained in Bharatanatyam and later went on to do a postgraduate degree in Dance Studies (Laban Centre, London, 2001). Keenly conscious of her need to be defined not as the exotic other, she chose to continue her journey in her native Chennai. Between 1999 and 2011, she worked with Padmini Chettur from where she inherited the evolving legacy of Chandralekha and a strong commitment to constantly redefine the Indian body. Working within the Indian contemporary dance scene as a performer, choreographer and facilitator, Preethi belongs to a league of dance-makers in India today who use dance as an agent of change. Her initial training in Bharatanatyam and her subsequent training to unlearn the strictures that this classical form placed on the body can be traced across many of her works. Her art is process-driven in a manner that makes it evident within the structure of the works she creates. This also leads to a demystification of the choreographic work – something that Preethi consciously aims for. Her ensemble work, The Jumping Project (2015) reflects an endeavour to find an honest body, possibly unbeautiful, but free of artifice. The artist has been engaged in creating a personal movement language that reflects her relationship with her context. She regards her own oeuvre as ‘an attempt to reclaim the body from numerous kinds of anaesthetization that it is constantly subjected to.’ Her creations are Kamakshi (2003) Inhabit (2006), Porcelain (2007) Pillar to Post (2007), Sweet Sorrow (2010), Light Doesn’t Have Arms To carry Us (2013), Anki Bunki Kata (2013), Across, Not Over (2014), Conditions of Carriage: The Jumping Project (2015), The Lost Wax Project (2018), Bird (2020), And Indeed There Will Be Time (2020). Preethi is one of the co-founders of Basement 21, a practice-based performance collective in Chennai.