Archipelago Archives Exhibit #0 is a performance lecture that introduces the spectator to Kiran Kumar’s Archipelago Archives project, that he initiated in 2016. This long-term artistic research project is a gesture of (re)imagining dances danced on an imaginary archipelago somewhere in the Indian Ocean. By studying practices of Hatha yoga, temple dance and music in South and South-East Asia, the archives offer artistic counterproposals to dominant Eurocentric understandings of being human in the world. In the wake of mounting questions of ecology, feminism and decoloniality in our present moment of modernity, the archives are an urgent investigation of both historically pre-modern and contemporary non-modern cultures.
Archipelago Archives Exhibit #0 is a performance lecture that introduces the spectator to Kiran Kumar’s Archipelago Archives project, that he initiated in 2016. This long-term artistic research project is a gesture of (re)imagining dances danced on an imaginary archipelago somewhere in the Indian Ocean. By studying practices of Hatha yoga, temple dance and music in South and South-East Asia, the archives offer artistic counterproposals to dominant Eurocentric understandings of being human in the world. In the wake of mounting questions of ecology, feminism and decoloniality in our present moment of modernity, the archives are an urgent investigation of both historically pre-modern and contemporary non-modern cultures.