Sharmi Basu – did i make it better?: Opening Reception
SHARMI BASU (she/they) is a multi-media performance artist, curator, and composer. She creates work that addresses vulnerability, accountability, and experiences of millennial diaspora through creating narratives of decolonial thinking toward individual and collective liberation. She attempts to catalyze a political, yet ethereal aesthetic by combining her anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics with a commitment to spirituality within the arts. Beast Nest, Sharmi’s primary performing project, utilizes an unwavering depression and restrained horror to channel left-eyed spirits. She is an MFA graduate from the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Electronic Music and Recording Media and has worked with Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, John Bischoff, Pauline Oliveros, Chris Brown, Maggi Payne, and more. Her performances and sound pieces show us that the abstract and immaterial experiences of trauma and pain can be liberated through our abstract creations in art and sound. She believes that transcending the emotional landscape is the key to accessing multidimensionality, and works with these ideas in her Decolonizing Sound workshops and her improvisation group, the Mara Performance Collective. She hosts a number of workshops that center on sound healing and self-accountability, as well as technical skill-shares world-wide. She is also a certified mediator focused on interpersonal healing within Queer and Trans BIPOC communities. Her ultimate goal through her work is to cultivate a sense of vulnerability and empowerment for herself and her community.
did i make it better? is a continuation of a series of self-investigation scores that explore accountability, harm, joy, and somatics. Thus far, these pieces have been self-contained as performance art pieces and workshops. Using video sculpture and performance, the pieces presented at Coaxial will investigate differing experiences of judgment, perspective, and the body as a tool for bending time to connect immateriality and materiality. These series of videos feature interviews with a variety of artists and musicians, centered on exploring the transmutation of trauma within the body through storytelling. She asks the audience to use these pieces to explore the ways in which sound, performance, and installation can prompt us to create different relationships with our personal and ancestral histories and our structural relationships to ourselves.
Saturday, February 15, 2020
6:00pm-9:00pm – Gallery Hours
9:00pm – 11:00pm – Performances & Screening by
Sepand and Sepehr Mashiahof are Iranian trans girl blood sisters who use the horror film genre as an arena to dismantle real life monster tropes imposed on queer bodies, where the trauma they’ve experienced from the cis hetero world has been repurposed as a toolbox for creativity, using an ethereal palette of fear and alienation to express stories of both resilience and despair.
Hana Harada identifies as equal parts absorbent and avoidant. Her urge to create completely alone and unseen is in constant conflict with her thirst for deep emotional connection with others. Traveling between these selves is her creative process. She is a musician, artist, and storyteller. Her visual work is an ongoing project under the moniker floppydisko and recent collaborations include the video game Little Bug which was released on Steam last year as well as the Bedroom Witch music video projects, Triptych and Grieving Spell.