Session Name: Archipelagic Asias - Modalities and Methods II: The Haptic Potency of Rice
2 - Manifesto of a steaming bowl of rice
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
11:15 – 13:00 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract ‘Manifesto of a steaming bowl of rice’ is a developing art project which is informed by the embodied memory of rice in Bengal. The work delves specifically into the visual and aural material surrounding the Bengal famine and contemporary bengal society. I am also specifically interested in rice as a grain and the politics surrounding it. The starchy, nourishing comfort of rice is held sacred by several people and cultures around the world. In Bengal too, this grain has been the pulse underlying the intimate, domestic and public life of society. Rituals surrounding weddings, births, funerals are incomplete without rice, and it also marks the passage of the everyday but being a part of the daily diet. A disruption in the supply of rice, then, is also the ebbing of an entire social and spiritual process. It is from this disruption, that my project will reposition questions of desire, representation and care.