Free to stream online from August 26-27, 2022, with a final in-person performance on the 27th at Branion Plaza, University of Guelph
2022-08-26
Raah is proud to sponsor award-winning interdisciplinary artist Amitesh Grover’s work for the IF Festival entitled ‘How I Got Here’. In the work, Grover commemorates 75 years of India’s Partition, and the resulting Independence. In the project, he reproduces a series of digital photographs from his family archive. Each photograph depicts a member of his family who experienced the 1947 Partition of India and was compelled to migrate to the ‘other side.’ The photographs chosen for this series contain personal stories of the Partition, each an inheritance handed down to the artist through tellings and re-tellings.
In this piece, Grover, breaks the code that visualizes the digital elaborations. The pixels of an image, when translated into the alphanumeric ASCII code, are a non-intelligible sequence of characters that contain all the information required to hold the image together. He writes into this ASCII code the stories of his family members, and in doing so, introduces memories into the impersonality of image data. This conscious act of ‘interference’ corrupts the image data to produce glitches and cracks in the resulting image. Using techniques of data bending to shape the transformative process, the original photograph disappears to produce, in its place, images that are broken, damaged, wrecked. In forcing data to coexist with personal (and collective) memories, he makes the injuries (re)appear in digital form. In the end, what emerges is not a photograph but an image that is itself wounded, carrying the bodies and stories of those partitioned from their land.
IF 2022 was a free, 24-hour online festival of improvised arts, featuring over 150 international performers of all disciplines—music, dance, theater, poetry, visual arts, and more. Presented by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) in partnership with festivals and community organizations around the world, this all-night celebration of the arts was free to stream online from August 26-27th, with a final in-person performance that happened on the 27th at Branion Plaza, University of Guelph.
This unique festival provided a chance for people around the world to reconnect with the arts from their homes. It was a celebration of this vast, diverse group of innovative artists doing what they do best: sharing inspiring performances that will make you smile, reflect, and reconnect with your surroundings & community.
For more information:
improvfest