If Deep Time is a frame to understand scales of time that are beyond human experience and history, then rocks are the witness to Deep Time.

Open Invitation is a project that investigates concerns around ecology, the environment and how we inhabit our planet. This is a project developed out of a year-long research process where we explore geological time, ancient landscape, and human presence through conscious listening. The constellation of art works that we created are contemplative, immersive, and experiential. Through the work we hope to raise questions around the relationship between narrative ontology and an anthropocentric approach to our concern with the ecological crisis that we find ourselves in. We wonder if foregrounding experience before it becomes a story, could place us in a different relationship to our world.  

This project has been supported by THE WITNESS, Switzerland and SWISSNEX, India

Feb 23rd, Friday 8pm

Open Invitation

Experimental Film

The film visually explores the relationship of the human form to the landscape and pays attention to time, both human and geological. It is a meditation on time and presence. 

Feb 24th, Saturday 2pm

Time and Presence

Workshop

The workshop invites participants to experience the methods of investigation used for this artistic research process. By engaging with conscious listening and slowing down, what do we notice about the relationship between experience, time and self. 

Feb 24th, Saturday 7.30pm

Singing Body

Live Performance

This is an improvisational performance score that brings movement and sound together through the common modality of breath. It explores a meditative, mindful, contemplative journey through movement and stillness, sound and silence that unfolds from a place of conscious listening. 

Across Deep Time

Sound album

Exploring immersive soundscapes that play with space and presence, this album seeks to capture the sonic texture of the landscape through eco-acoustic experiments. 

The People

Shabari Rao (lead research artist) is an artist and educator whose work is grounded in practice-based research. Her primary interest is in the question of what counts as knowledge and how is the body involved in creating it.

Bindhumalini Narayanswamy (collaborating artist) is a singer and composer interested in exploring and expressing the soul stirring power of music and silence.

Manush John (collaborating artist) is an artist and filmmaker who is interested in critically looking at human systems and knowledge creation in the context of impending environmental catastrophe.

Navya Sah (collaborating artist) is an Indian multidisciplinary artist who works in the realms of sound, film, movement and writing. Her work studies emotional responses on the politics of power and love. She likes the quiet.

About Harkat

Harkat is an alternative arts and performance space, boutique arts studio, analog film lab and production company — programming, curating and creating on the fringe in Mumbai. We are a collective of passionate storytellers from diverse cultural, business and creative backgrounds, all bound together by the love of sustaining an arts space which in-turn supports our collective dreams. As an alternative performance arts space, we have hosted more than 500 shows in the past years in the mediums of theatre, film, music, community projects contemporary art. We support the new, unheard, upcoming, exciting, cutting edge, the political, the forgotten, nostalgic, melancholic, soul stirring, the beautiful & more. And that's what Harkat is. Harkat.