Dominique Savitri

My name is Dominique Savitri Bonarjee

While I work with a vast array of media, I center the body as my primary material and research interface. Through dance, physical, and vocal experiments, I seek to untether forms from (human) cultural perceptions, to experience matter’s nameless state. My embodied research is about defamiliarizing my own body. I do this by exploring the energetic polarity between false binaries, through dance explorations involving pace, stillness/activity, texture (resistant/pliant), qualities of touch, duration, repetition. My somatic approach is guided by movement and meditation techniques from non-Western cosmologies (Sufi, Daoist, Buddhist, Advaita Vedanta) and related artistic forms (Dervish Whirling, Hindustani Raga, Noh Theatre and Butoh Dance) that I practice.

The radical juxtaposition of the ‘body as material entity’ with other matter, creates an ontological equivalence that invites unknown agencies to collaborate in the process. This results in intuitive artworks that take unusual forms: flesh turns sculptural, drawings emit vibrations, installations become instruments.

My works are never fully complete or repeatable but stay open to transformation. Following sonic principles of harmony and dissonance, they take on new impermanent forms attuned to the install or activation as a whole. I call this way of staging art, weaving a rhythmic field, a fluid art form which aims to thicken time, by amplifying nonhuman presences, atmospheric entities (chi 氣) and latent energy. Because when time becomes palpable, it disorients the sense of ‘I’-ness, immersing the witness in opaque intrainfraspacetime, to wonder if I is you is we?

biography

Dominique Savitri Bonarjee is a polycultural artist currently based in London. She is in the final throes of completing her Art PhD at Goldsmiths University of London. Her doctoral project, Space of the Nameless, looks at embodied ways of knowing that challenge dominant epistemes through an open-ended and collaborative artistic practice.

Her first monograph, Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer, is published by Routledge (2024). She proposes an embodied approach to Butoh dance, exploring Butoh’s origins in postwar Japan, and questioning its current relevance, and resonance, in a time of widespread ecological collapse and societal instability.

She stages her work in diverse environments including galleries, performance venues, festivals, often also in public space, derelict buildings, and outdoors. She twice participated in the Nakanojo Biennale in Japan, danced in the Isamu Noguchi Room (Keio University) Tokyo and at Kunstfest Weimar, exhibited at Galerie Wedding in Berlin (2016), the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC). She collaborated with Astrida Neimanis, author of ‘Bodies of Water’, for Lofoten International Arts Festival 2019. Most recently she staged her current work at Iklectik Art Lab, and performed with Natsu Nakajima’s Mutekisha Dance Company in Tokyo (2023).

She welcomes collaboration towards imagining creative encounters that go beyond both the art market or institutional pressure to make ‘socially engaged’ work.