SHAKTI WHO?
Visual Artist, Performer, Author etc.
Shakti Milan Sharma is an emerging inter-sectional multidisciplinary artist from New Delhi, India. His area of interests/concerns consistently engage with questions of body in both, the phenomenological and the performative contexts through multiple prisms and lenses. His creative explorations have been demonstrated through different forms and modes of practice encouraging calibrated staging of complex ideas regarding human existence, questions of identity, gendered body, urban experience, body as an archive of learnt responses as well as unconscious reflexes etc.
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SHAKTI HOW?
Trajectory
After pursuing undergraduate degree in History from Hansraj College-Delhi University and receiving training in modern/contemporary dancing for three years, he moved ahead with his endeavours and extended his attempts in his Masters in Visual Arts Practice from Ambedkar University Delhi under the guidance of Shivaji K Panikkar, Santhosh Sadanand, Shefalee Jain, Vidya Shivadas and Abhinandita Mathur. His learnings from the course: rethinking practices, investigating archives, public/community/collaborative art and curatorial investigations helped him to evolve his ideas & thoughts that created possibilities for being a versatile practitioner. Simultaneously, it helped him to reflect back upon his creative trajectory and to see his politics of practice through the lens of criticality.
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Working through different forms and modes of practice also comes from his commitment to think through how the choice of the medium can determine the ways in which an artwork is received. From producing drawings, sketches, illustrations, sculptures, installations, photo montages/collages, zines, digital videos, live/video/photo performances, crafting poems, working with communities,texts,sound,objects etc.
He pushed his disciplinary boundaries in order to understand artistic practice in conversation with social sciences, history, natural sciences and other disciplines rather than see it as a stand-alone discipline in a typically modernist and formalist sense
His research is an articulation and exploration of the body as a medium within the framework of contemporary art practices as well as in the history of performance art practice. It also examines whether the body qualifies as an 'archive' by looking back at some selected contribution/practices of Indian & global artists and by reflecting, locating & challenging/questioning his own contribution as a practitioner in the context of the same question(s). Intrigued from these enquiries, he sees the scope of possibilities a performing body produces via interaction with space, time/ephemerality, space, structures, context, material and other tangents through the mode of practice. He strives to examine the persisting prominence of the body (as a medium and as an archive) in an age where other infinite mediums are available & where ‘anti archival’ practices are seeping in. Apart from the academia, art world & activism, he has extended his creative reaches in spheres of fashion, commercial & parallel cinema and endeavors of government.
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