Artistic Research | Interdisciplinary practice

Interweaving dance, Philosophy, Social Sculpture, Dialogical aesthetics, socially engaged art practice, my work explores marginality, stigma and empathy through Artistic Research. Empathy, as a special kind of imaginative act (Edith Stein) is a process that takes place between individuals, making the intersubjective space an evocative terrain for knowledge creation. Akin to a ‘stage-hand’ (Theron Schdmit), I make possible the conditions for empathy: including preparing the space with warmth materials (with Lara Niuwenhuis), exploring and embodying the space through light and shadows (with Elisabeth Wildling), creating and sensing resonance (with Aboli Dhayarkar) and open hardened ways of thinking, unfix meanings and create new anaesthetic responses to others (with Minou Polleros).
My embodied semantic analysis is coupled with socially engages art practice viz. designing empathy-practices to reduce the gap between mainstream society and marginalised communities (e.g. people suffering from stigma against leprosy, dementia, ageism, refugees). These take varied formats from tea-making to postcard-writing, and employ multiple art forms (like drawing, movement, weaving) depending on the inner capacity to be honed, and can be adopted to any conflict situation. Together, the collaborations and work in this portfolio, including classical dance performances and teaching experience, seek to expand our sesnsibilities, sensitivities, challenge the social status quo, flatten hierarchies, open spaces for multiplicities and create a sahridaya—someone with a heart, with whom we can have a heart to heart connection.