"Dominique is searching for a new invisible space which only comes out of her body, beyond any intellectual meaning."

Takeshige Shinichi

I am a water body and I wish to remember how to swim on dry land?

ARTIST STATEMENT

Dominique Savitri Bonarjee

I investigate how art practice can become a way of sensing energies that exceed language, identity, and fixed form. Working across dance, choreography, installation, sculpture, sound, film, visual scores, material processes, and electronic experimentation, I create sensory spaces inviting others to join me in perceiving time from the inner landscape of their own body; as change, the unknown, the imaginal darkness.

Across the diverse media I work with, my process begins with inventing embodied practices of attention and intuition so as to listen to material and ambient knowledge. This way, I create frameworks for chance and spontaneity to guide the practice. I draw on dances, rituals and the crafting of votive objects in wisdom traditions I've encountered. I have a diverse cultural heritage and have journeyed widely, living in Japan, Zimbabwe, India and across Europe. Through my art I explore what belonging means beyond fixed identities and categories, to explore the uncanniness of first person experience, states of dissociation linked to nondual states/"subject-object collapse", and the question ' who am I''/'who is the 'I'?' 

I challenge contemporary cultures of extraction through the visceral poetry of embodiment in collective actions such as COLLAPSE. Against systems that measure energy through labour, productivity, optimisation, or economic value, my work explores energy as relation, resonance, and infinity. The legacy of postwar Japanese Butoh has ignited me in this regard.

Can aesthetic practice offer places of pleasure, rest, dreaming, and collective imagination, in which our (human) technologies can be utilized to participate in more-than-human ecologies?

The manifold ways in which I work and create are different expressions of a single inquiry: how we might learn to respect and attune to the energetic relations that constitute our bodies, our ecologies, and our shared worlds.