If one were to tune into the resonant nooks and crannies, crackles and grooves, dust and silverfish, holes and leaks in physical and digital artefacts, what new forms of indexicality would they activate? How can speculative listening, fictioning, and short-circuiting be brought in as a set of orientating instruments to make one’s way through the spatiality and duration of an archive? When points, nodes, and surfaces that don’t usually touch, cross with one another—what new ways of knowing and reading can be mobilised?
With these questions as entry points, a two-day workshop focused on “corruption” as a methodological and conceptual device will guide participants to enter into and work through archival material. Led by Suvani Suri, and through a mode of collective inquiry, the workshop is an attempt to trace out and generate a range of articulations and possibilities around what it could mean to “listen” to an archive.
The participatory workshop will include intensive discussion, artistic interventions, readings, and a screening. Readings and other resources will be shared ahead of and during the workshop.
This workshop will be held on 1 Mar and 2 Mar 2024 from 2–5pm at the Asia Art Archive in India space in New Delhi. It is open to practitioners across disciplines exploring or currently working with archives. Only 12 participants will be selected due to limited seating. The workshop is free of charge, and refreshments will be provided.
Suvani Suri is an artist based in New Delhi. She works with sound, text, and intermedia assemblages that think through modes of listening and voicing. Her practice plumbs the gaps, cracks, absurdities, and excesses embedded within the technological processes of production, mediation, and perception of sound. This often takes the form of podcasts, objects, installations, mixtapes, workshops, curatorial propositions, publications, live and/or discursive sessions, and collective interventions. Additionally, Suvani composes sound for video and performance works, and has been teaching at several educational spaces where her pedagogical interests conflate with a sustained inquiry into the digital and sonic sensorium.
Suvani’s works have been exhibited at Serendipity Arts Festival (2023), Kunsthalle Bern (2022), Five Million Incidents (2020), Khoj Curatorial Intensive South Asia (2019), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018), Mumbai Art Room (2018), and Sound Reasons Festival VI (2018). As part of a collective inquiry, she co-conceived the telephonic project, Out of Line (2019), which received the FICA Public Art Grant (2021). She was one of the curators for the Students Biennale at Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2022, and is an artist and curator with the programme, Capture All: A Sonic Investigation, developed by Sarai (Delhi) and Liquid Architecture (Melbourne).
Banner Image: Images generated using OpenAI from Lantian Xie's prompt “silverfish metabolising the archive,” in Eating The Archive: In Conversation With Anthony Leung Po Shan And Lantian Xie.
The AAA Learning & Participation Programme is generously supported by the S. H. Ho Foundation Limited.