Born in Bombay India, Jaishri Abichandani immigrated to NYC in 1984. She received her MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London and has continued to intertwine art and activism in her career. Abichandani has shown her work internationally including P.S.1/ MOMA, the Queens Museum of Art, and Exit Art in New York, the House of World Cultures in Berlin, Avanthay Contemporary in Zurich, the Castle of Good Hope in Capetown, Gallery Chemould, Nature Morte and Gallery Sumukha in India. She has also curated a number of exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art, Exit Art and the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Florida. She is the Founder and Director of the South Asian Women's Creative Collective (SAWCC) and the Asian Women's Creative Collective, London.
Bijli/ Mohammed Fayyaz is a dear friend and drag queen from Pakistan who sought asylum on grounds of sexual orientation. An accomplished performer, Bijli often dances in public spaces; however this video offers the viewer a very intimate and personal performance of a traditional folk song about love and longing. Marvin Sewell composed original music for this piece.
2.5mins 2006
Three Muses was created entirely in Brooklyn, New York. It was produced in collaboration with a musician (Marvin Sewell) and three singers of Indian (Samita Sinha), Pakistani (Bijli) and Nepali (Tenzin Dolker) origin. I worked out tonal ranges and songs with the singers then gave a composer Marvin Sewell a brief about the ideas behind the piece and a video recording of their renditions. He composed the soundtrack; which I then treated visually. The ensuing result of our process is an ambient video piece, which combines my interests in spirituality, feminist and identity issues, whist engaging formal art historical dialogues about painting and landscape, abstraction and representation, hi and low brow, written, performative and visual art.
2006
Interview with a Reluctant Veteran: Anuradha Bhagwati. 19.00 mins 2007
This video interview was created for an exhibit at PS1/MOMA entitled Emergency Room. As one of the participating artists, I was required to create work on a daily basis that responded to something in the media within 24 hours prior to production. In response to the Senate debate, I researched and interviewed an female Indian- American veteran about the proposed troop increase in Iraq. Anuradha Kristina Bhagwati was a Captain in the United States Marine Corps from 1999 through 2004. Shot in a fashion that simulates media sound bites, the video focuses on Anuradha’s perspective on violence in the military.”