Dominique Savitri Bonarjee is an Indian-French artist with a practice that spans choreography, sound, and visual art. She tends to stage her work as techno-rituals within live installations: an experimental form that affords inventive combinations of animate and inanimate elements, and allows for composition—often in real time—guided by ways of tuning into principles of breath and energy that already inhabit the space. Trained in diverse movement practices that nurture porosity and gut intelligence, she researches ancient wisdom traditions, seeking to develop a more playful and intuitive relationship to contemporary computational technologies. A recurring theme is ‘unknown knowing’—the aha moment—which can arise in immersive experiences. Her sensory artworks seduce audiences into states of deep listening, remembrance, and spiritual (breathing) solidarity in an era of ecological and societal collapse. For her, dance comes from psychosomatic curiosity and practices of attention that counter tempos of production; such a dance is a somatic revolt that creates bodies unfit for the present system of extraction.
In her project Butoh Mutations, she explores the contemporary aesthetics of the non-object through participatory pedagogies, developing public artworks, poetic activism, and collective embodied research. Her first monograph, Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer (Routledge, 2024), documents her encounters with seminal Japanese performance artists who forged dance as a visceral response to the post-atomic landscape. Her doctoral art project, Space of the Nameless (Goldsmiths, 2024), explores “the detached eye/I,” a riddle inherited from Buddhism via Butoh, which leads her to an embodied methodology of self-witnessing, deployed as a processual strategy for art-making without an object(ive).
Selected exhibitions include: Museum of Art and Photography, Bangalore; Iklectik Art Lab; Nakanojo Biennale, Japan; Chicago Art Institute; Kunstfest Weimar; the Isamu Noguchi Room, Tokyo; Galerie Wedding Berlin; Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC); Tate Modern. She collaborated with Astrida Neimanis, author of Bodies of Water, at the Lofoten International Arts Festival (2019). She has been mentored by electronic sound pioneer Atau Tanaka.
"The external layer of my body-material changes with the weather. The pigmentation of my epidermis moves across a gradient, from light brown in places where the winter is cold and sunless, to darker shades when the sun is about. For reference and a recognizable categorization, these browns are equivalent to ..."