Samples of work and artistdesigners statement Raheema Begum

Samples of work and artist/designer's statement: Raheema Begum

Still from video , 'Reconnaissance', July 2008, Gallery Sumukha, Bangalore.

‘Squat’ is an online event which uses social networks as a metaphor for movement across the existing territorial borders of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Participants were asked to switch networks and locate themselves in a country their choice and then report at the One State Solution Blog. April 2008

Banner for One State Solution Week 2008. The One State Solution Weeks are exploratory events that bring voices together in favour of a softening of borders and the formation of political coalition between India and Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Still from 'Puncturing labels', fifth in the series of performances of 'Reconnaissance'.

All performances in this show were collaborative. The entire installation was a space where participants could explore movements after embodying an identity of their choice, after interacting with me.

My format of performance work is non-proscenium and interactive, movement using spoken word and live or recorded music. The forms I derive from are varied and diverse. Each aesthetic necessitates certain theatrics and movement vocabularies, and a corresponding genre or kind of music.

Photographs by Nitin Mayanath.

picture by Prasanna My training in performance movement arts began in Bangalore. I started learning dance at the Attakalari Center for Movement Arts.

‘Why am I so blasé’(Video) is a performance about mediating the personal and the political and the juxtapositions between the two. The performance plots the life of young urban woman in the Indian subcontinent and tries to relate her inhabited world with the terrain of her mind. This was my first performance as a young urban kid from Bangalore interests me as a city because I grew up in it and would like to view it from a different lens, having lived, since then in the small town of Baroda, and then having seen the great ghastly profuse and enlightening spectacle that is Bombay. This city also interests me for its significance in the emergent flat world, for its significance as the Mecca of outsourcing and its new geographies and how the ways in which they vie with the old. It interests me as a city of this convergence of old and new…

The nature of my work is participatory and political in that it tries to build and nurture spaces for equality and energetic play.

Screen-shot of interface for my performance arts and entrepreneurial initiative, 'labels' at http: //whosebody. wordpress. com. 'labels' is an initiative about dealing with identity in a globalising world.

New narratives fuel the performance cycle in the labels paradigm.