Musician, artist, curator and activist Poulomi Desai joins artist Seema Mattu to reflect on the first stage of ‘Local Superstar’ and consider wider questions about representation in music, relationships between women in sonic spaces, the nature of improvisation, and entanglements that arise through working together.
Poulomi is a trailblazer for South Asian queer arts. In 1987 she co-founded Shakti, the UK's first South Asian LGBTQ+ organisation, carving out safe space at a time when queer South Asian people had few spaces of their own. She went on to co-found the Naz Foundation, one of the first HIV/AIDS charities to serve South Asian communities.
Decades on, her practice lives in sound; modified sitars, VLF radio noise, tape loops and feedback, what she calls "electromagnetic black noise." She's performed at Tate Modern, Cafe OTO and Wysing Polyphonic, and her photographic archive was part of Tate's Women in Revolt! exhibition.
By seeking feedback from a Sonic Elder of Poulomi's standing Seema hopes to explore when sound is moving toward liberation and when it is reproducing constraint, how to hold experimentation and accountability together and how to keep space for not-knowing within processes that are often expected to produce clarity or direction.
BYOI: Bring Your Own Instruments! The event will culminate in a sonic jam as we let loose and collectively explore what a liberatory sound feels like in the body. Poulomi will bring her homemade instruments and you are invited to play them or bring your own musical instruments or noise making objects of any kind. No skills or musical knowledge are required.
About Poulomi
Poulomi Desai is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. She is self-taught and for over 30 years, has been involved in performance, live art, sound and photography installations interrogating the politics of identity, listening and perception, inspired by her activist and DIY post punk background.
She subverts broken sitars into new electronic instruments for improvised performance, melding circuit bent toys, modified cassette decks, optikinetic instruments, kitchen knives, axes and massage tools. She works with collage, field recordings, VLF radio noise, petri dish bacterial photography and ideas of ‘electromagnetic black noise’, embracing chance, loss of control and questioning 'authenticity'.
Recent haptic works are part of the Heritage Quay / British Music Collection archives where she was a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow and is an Oram Award recipient. Exhibitions include The Serpentine Gallery, Autograph ABP, The Science Museum London, Habitat India and The Baltic. She co-founded Shakti, the first South Asian LGBTQ+ club and organisation, the NAZ HIV/AIDs project, and HAC - the punk art, Asian performance company in the 80s and runs the Usurp Art Charity, supporting outsider artists.
Access Note: This event will involve improvised sound making which might be quite loud and discordant. Ear defenders and earplugs will be available and we can provide a quiet space if needed. If you would like to talk through any other access needs drop us an email on info@eastsideprojects.org