BODY AS ARCHIVE  | New Delhi  | 5-12 Deceber 2018

Co-curators: Hediyeh Azma & Sumedha Bhattacharya

Video Maker: Mehran Golmohammadi

Installation: Aida Mirza khani & Marzie Jafarpour

Artists Collaborating: Asqar Faridi Masouleh, Aalieh Forouqi, Mohsen Goudarzi

Performers in the video: Yegane Kamarkhani, Rojin Mansouri, Yasmin Vafaei, Hediyeh Azma, Shabnam Kermani

An archive has often been defined as a ‘material’ or a ‘tangible’ documentation of history. Can an archive be something ‘immaterial’ or ‘intangible’? Can’t it be an embodiment of ‘memories´? Can’t the body be the archive of re-enactments of such memories? Such ‘body memories’. How the historical narrative of nation-building carved the body memory in Iranian classical dance and Indian Kathak, towards a current body memory of the practitioners today? Which of these remembrance have they accumulated, preserved and continue to retrieve? Has memory be frozen or imposed?

With these questions, Body as Archive provokes the larger notion of the classic-ness, in these forms which breathes tradition in its being and contemporary in its existence.