Dominique Savitri BARON-BONARJEE | IN/FR/UK

“Following a fluid logic, my works move across media and bodies, feeling for channels through which to deploy the ethos of an embodied philosophy,.”

Dominique Savitri makes art that evolves out of her practical approach to spirituality following the Eastern traditions, coupled with her experience of living between cultures and.ethnicities. Her works exude a radical materiality that seeks an embedded and embodied response to ‘cosmo-technical’ (Yuk Hui, 2017) questions and ecological contingency. Her works propose spaces of generative contemplation, and she often collaborates with other artists, strangers, friends, relatives and nonhuman actors.

She has shown work in galleries, festivals, biennales and public space, including at the Nakanojo Biennale in Japan, the Isamu Noguchi Room (Keio University) Tokyo, Galerie Wedding in Berlin, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC). She collaborated with Astrida Neimanis, author of ‘Bodies of Water’, for Lofoten International Arts Festival 2019; she presented her lecture-performance ‘Tales of Fabrication’ at the Tai Kwun Centre in Hong Kong for the ASAP Annual Symposium, and the accompanying film was screened at Tate Exchange, London. Public space performances have been commissioned by Chisenhale Dance Space (London), and Håb / Word of Warning in Manchester.

In 2018, she received an Invention Creativity and Experience Award (ICE Fund) from Goldsmiths University for her participatory research project ‘What do We Know About Free Time?’ This comprised of a series of movement sessions and discussions exploring the relation of time, occupation and body. As part of this inquiry, she collaborated with Kobakant, an electronic tailoring collective in Berlin, to make a hand-crafted wearable technology object for her current project ‘Love is in the Wireframe’.

Dominique lived in Japan for four years, and maintains a close connection with the contemporary art community there, through collaborations with many Japanese and East Asian artists. She participated in the Nakanojo Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015 & 2017). In 2018 she collaborated with award-winning sculptor Kyoko Fujiwara, for the performance-installation Arcadia based on her research into Artificial Intelligence with Tokyo Institute of Technology scientists, and the psychology of the flow state.  

Her current project in the Art Department, Goldsmiths University of London, Space of the Nameless, questions knowledge and knowing from the perspective of the ‘nondual’ spiritual traditions.