NOLI ME TANGERE (touch me not) PART II is a performance that evolved from a series of conversations and a performance by the same name. It is rooted in commonalities between sensual chapters of Greek and Indian mythology involving deities committing crimes of mortal men. Comparing the Greek myth of ‘Leda and the Swan’ to the Indian myth of Indra as ‘The thousand-eyed God’, Singh and Bartlett conjure these stories as catalysts for discussing gender, race and sexuality through a process of invented ritual and play. By embodying these myths, Bartlett becomes Zeus and Singh becomes Indra occupying the violence, love, passion, and the hubristic ego humans share with Gods.
KŪLDEEP SIÑGH & HEIDI WIREN BARTLETT (INDIA/US)
HEIDI WIREN BARTLETT is an interdisciplinary performance artist from the Great Plains. She considers her white body an object of vulnerability, power and politic. The focus of her research are the intersections of that body within Nature and natural processes, animism and invented ritual. Her work is a reaction to the hegemonic social and political landscapes in which she lives. Whether creating laborious action or still objects, she blurs the line between public and private; deconstructing notions of gender, race and corporeality through sculpture, moving image and performance.
KŪLDEEP SIÑGH is an interdisciplinary artist, working in visual art and Indian classical dance of Odissi. He creates narratives and scenes that transcend media, culture and timelines. Through drawings and arrangements in movement he sets equations between Odissi and its percussion system into static visual expression. His works attempt to stretch layers beyond their original medium and thus act as romantic laboratories that extend trajectories investigating kinship to installation, performance and moving image.
As a research-based artist, his practice is informed by postcolonial literature and is rooted in Indian aesthetics of first millennium AD. Through his intensive training in Odissi, a compound system of codified movement, gestures and percussive mnemonics, he extracts components in acting, sound and spatial design creating startling temporal manifestations. By favouring methods of collage, jump cuts and juxtaposition, he creates a language that is highly personal and poly-faceted which seeks a parallel to the architectonics of South Indian Hindu temples, where overlap of functions is the accepted norm.
