Kaushikee Gupta
About
b.1997, India
Based in London and Delhi.
Exhibitions:
>arcmagazine.org (online) [2020]
>302Redirect (online) [2020]
-thisistomorrow.info (Live performance)
-ICA Daily feature
-@low_res_camera_roll (Instagram residency)
>Malefesance, Ugly Duck [2020]
>Potluck, Dyson Gallery [2020]
>As Ann M. Hue reminisces about the play “the smartphone was invented before the candle”, Dyson Gallery [2020]
>ACROSS RCA - ISH (Zine publication workshop-exhibition concentrating on colour and writing) [2019]
>Capped Out, Old Biscuit Factory [2019]
>Intimately Familiar, Cobham Hall [2019]
>NTS-Radio (Critical Practice) [2019]
>CVAN Platform Exhibition, Turner Contemporary [2018]
>Mr. Sandman, CRATE [2018]
>DOMINO, CRATE [2018]
>The Gaze, Satellite-Whitstable Biennale [2018]
>[Insert Title Here], UCA Degree Show [2018]
>MEZE, Cyprus College of Art (ERASMUS Residency) [2017]
>Taking a Line for a Walk, Marcell Gallery [2017]
>Luminosity, The Brewery Tap Folkestone [2017]
Awards
CRATE Graduate Award
PEATS Grampus Heritage ERASMUS Scholarship
Statement
Dear reader,
I hope the following voice will give you a sense of my concerns.
The exact smell and taste of home which I very well know is slipping away from memory; and this inability to recreate it. Cardamoms which aren’t the exact shade of green, my eyes recognise. Saffron-always either too much or too little. Never quite right. Burnt taste of the supposedly lukewarm milk. The hunt of things that were once familiar - that keeps changing as we migrate/move/leave.
Draping, pleating, stirring, folding, packing narratives that end as abruptly as it begins while still adapting in every new city. Navigating space and the notion of home through plates of food and the secrets of the spice box.
Texts becoming more than documents and files in folders in my Drives. Not letting myself and the audience get intimidated by them. Engaging and conversing and finding the most appropriate means to translate the texts out of my laptop. How to get intimate with them and the variations with which it is encountered?
Fleshing out language and structure; the need for voice and why my voice; the choices regarding performance and performers. To dig a bit deeper into how the dynamic changes or alters from the text in print and via live narrations. Along with the not so subtle differences in moving houses and leaving home.
The need for “liveness.” The value of the text - the listener/audience/witness - the narrator (witnessing the witness?)
Always questioning authenticity (in) and theatre and performance. The need and absurdity of my presence when the setting and the frame changes. (encountering it live and through the screen)
A constant and persistent query of being a writer, a performer, and/or a storyteller?
-Kaushikee Gupta
[an Artist nonetheless]
Packing The Spice Box
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
16th JULY - 12 noon and 07:00 pm [CAP page]
19th JULY - 12 noon
22nd JULY - 07:00 pm
25th JULY - 12 noon [CAP page]
28th JULY - 07:00 pm
31st JULY - 12 noon [CAP PAGE]
It is a tale of moving houses and leaving home with the box full of secrets. A tale of the angry hissing sound of the oil; the clanking bangles against the stainless steel spice box, and the memories and complex emotions and the politics that it brings with itself.
The backdrop of a household act as mundane as folding the sarees and pleating the edges along with the narrative of home - space - and the slippage of what was once familiar - that changes when we move houses or leave home.
The Performance will be live-streamed through Twitch on the dates and times stated in the image. The performance lasts about 20 minutes and enacts the mundane and narrates tales of home, cities, untangible sense of taste, and smell as a way to fold and pleat memories to archive space. Come! Listen.
Medium: Text - Voice - Story - Spices - Suitcase - Performance
Size: 20 minutes (approx)
REMNANTS OF A ROOM - a recipe book
A Recipe Book which talks through a few delicacies of home and maybe gets a bit too stuck in the ingredients, spices, and the process. A desperate effort to hold on to the taste and the smell which is never quite exactly what it was. Navigating space and the notion of home through unraveling the secrets of the spice box and mapping a plate of food. Let's unpack the Spice Box.
Medium: Text-Images- recipe- stories
Size: 14 pages
AT A DIFFERENT TIME IN A DIFFERENT CITY
A walk along Tour Guide Recording crossing over different cities at different times for anyone to follow from anywhere. A sense of how the home is not always a physical space - it is a mental space. It lives in you as much as you live in it. A narrative to take you through cityscapes and lost spaces, and memories of home. Plugin your headphones and take a walk across your own city or town or village or room or across your own memories and between fiction and non-fiction and the politics of space. Come, take a walk with me.
Medium: Text - Voice - Story - Guide / Directions Narration
Size: 14 minutes 54 seconds