This event brings together words, moving images, and sounds by three artists whose work has, at particular times in their practices, engaged with devotion, states of transcendence, and collective power.
This event will bring together; Jasleen Kaur, who will present a reading of existing text pieces, Nicola Singh, who will elaborate on her sound-work present in our current exhibition, Sincere Seeker, and Alia Syed, whose film ‘Eating Grass’ (2003) will be screened. This moving image work moves through emotional and bodily states marked by the five Muslim prayers, and the title references Pakistan’s Prime Minister. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, when, in 1974 amid the nuclear arms race with India, he said his people would have their own nuclear weapon even if it meant ‘eating grass.’
Tea and light refreshments provided, free but booking essential.
Jasleen Kaur is an artist making with the slurry of life. Raised amidst betrayal, secrecy and banished outsiders, her work is to make sense of what is out of view or withheld. She is called towards plurality, declassifications, polyphony, the blur. She is practising singing in the sediment till she is intoxicated.
Her work has been shown at Tate Britain (2024), Tramway, Scotland (2023), Touchstones Rochdale (2021), Wellcome Collection, London (2021), Serpentine Civic, London (2020), Glasgow Women’s Library, Scotland (2019), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle (2019), MIMA, Middlesbrough (2018), Cubitt Gallery, London (2018), Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2017), Jerwood Space, London (2015). In 2019 her book Be Like Teflon was co-published by Glasgow Women’s Library and Dent-de-leone. She was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Artist Award in 2021 and winner of the Turner Prize 2024.
Nicola Singh is a multi-disciplinary artist, researcher and pedagogue based between the UK and India.
Her work is rooted in contemporary performance art. Her research interests are voice, sound and song as cultural signifiers, as tools for spiritual practice and as a means of interrogating language. She works across sonic traditions, with improvisation techniques and via different modes of listening. She is interested in trans-national techniques of mantra and meditation, and how language, sound and repetition are used as transcendental vehicles in these practices. She also uses mantra-like repetition and improvisation to demonstrate the mutability and difficulty of language.
Nicola integrates her expanded vocal technique with the influence of Yogic breath practices and classical North Indian vocal music. She is currently training in Dhrupad with Pandit Uday Bhawalkar.
She also experiments with modes of listening and somatic practice in performance, pedagogic and social justice settings. Most recently, using Yoga Nidra as a tool to support global majority activists in connecting to ancestral wisdoms.
She uses prop and costume to play with the aesthetics of sound, as well as exploring the physicality of the ‘improvising body’ – testing out embodied states as performative devices. Experiments include weight training and ritual fasting as a precursor to vocal improvisation.
She also makes speculative and post-performance works on paper.
Alia Syed is an experimental film maker whose work has been shown extensively in cinemas and galleries around the world. She is interested in story telling: the protean nature of self-narration, enfolding fact and fiction, how histories are made and unmade, especially in relation to culture, diaspora and location.
Syed’s films have been shown at numerous institutions around the world including, BBC Arts Online (currently), Tigers and Dragons: India and Wales in Britain (currently) Glynn Vivian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2012-13, 5th Moscow Biennale (2013); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2009); XV Sydney Biennale (2006); Hayward Gallery, London (2005); Tate Britain, London (2003); Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, Scotland (2002); Iniva, London (2002); The New Art Gallery in Walsall (2002); and Tate Modern, London (2000), Reina Sophia Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid (2009), Courtisane Festival, Belgium (2019) WKV, Stuttgart (2019) and Yale Centre for British Art (2019). Syed’s films have also been the subject of several solo exhibitions at Talwar Gallery in New York and New Delhi.
