Open Invitation
Open Invitation Collective is a group of artists who share similar concerns around ecology, the environment and how we inhabit our planet. After a year-long research process we are excited to share these art works where we explore geological time, ancient landscape, and human presence through conscious listening. The art works that we have created are contemplative, immersive, and experiential. This project has been supported by SONIC MATTER, Switzerland and SWISSNEX, India
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The Work
Open Invitation
Film by Shabari and Manush
The film visually explores the relationship of the human form to the landscape. There is also an attention to time in the film, which seeks to evoke a sense of expanse and immersion. The film has no words, and is non-narrative.
Singing Body
Performance by Bindhumalini and Shabari
Singing Body is an improvisational performance score that brings movement and sound together through the common modality of breath. It explores a meditative, mindful, contemplative journey through movement and stillness, sound and silence that unfolds from a place of conscious listening.
Deep Time
Sound album by Navya and Bindhumalini
Exploring immersive soundscapes that play with space and presence, this album seeks to capture the sonic texture of the landscape through eco-acoustic experiments.
Process Installation and Artist talk
by Open Invitation Collective
The process installation traces the research journey of this project. Often in an art project, only the final outcomes are shared with the public. But as this project had an important research process component, we want to make that available to our audiences.
Talk by Thejaswi Shivanand
If deep time is a frame to understand scales of time that are beyond human experience and history, then rocks are the witness to deep time. This talk will open up some ideas around our current understanding of deep time as captured by these rocks and a geological approach to reading the landscape around us.
The People
Shabari Rao is an artist and educator whose work is grounded in practice based research. Her primary interest is in the question: what counts as knowledge and how is the body involved in creating it?
Bindhumalini Narayanswamy is a singer and composer interested in exploring and expressing the soul stirring power of music and silence.
Manush John is an artist and filmmaker who is interested in critically looking at human systems and knowledge creation in the context of impending environmental catastrophe.
Navya Sah is an Indian multidisciplinary artist who works in the realms of sound, film, movement and writing. Her work studies emotional responses on the politics of power and love. She likes the quiet.
When Thejaswi Shvanand began reading in childhood, the Indian tectonic plate was farther away from the Eurasian plate by 66 cm. He likes to track the consequences of this plate movement during annual hikes in the Himalayas while continuing to read and work as a curator and library educator at Champaca Bookstore and Children's Library.
Malvika Jha is an experimental media artist with an interest in performance. She uses her dreams to reflect on the roots of human emotions within body and memory. She focuses on the mind-body duality to inform her art practice.