"Body Molds"
is a multi-disciplinair project by Sharmini Tharmaratnam with colaborations of Krzysztof Durajczyk (and other artists/advicers).
The body is the visiblility of the soul, the movement its language, sound. Its existencialistic facts,its restless searching, its universal patterns,its soul and deeper self, its relations to Nature and environments, Societies, makes it move all the time. Dance.
Sharmini is interested in;
-its forms and proportions, lights and shadows, volumes, space; the body as a perfect mold itself
-its force to improvements, be it physical growth, psycological growth, sprititual growth, materialistic growth, migration,change; molding in relation to the circumstances, growing out of molds
-its tendency to stillness; be it sleep, fear, death, decay, negative forces, pausing, thinking, meditation, just being, hiding or embracing itself in a warm cover or shield
-its needs to adjust, adopt, comfor, scrap, errase, hide, escape, accept; going into or coming out of a mold
-its longing for freedom, thinking outside the mold
-its longing for continuation , eternity, leaving something behind; the mold that is left behind the footsteps, the print of life
-its habbits of marking territory, conquest, invade; the mold that marks the boundaries
"Body molds" talk about the space around, the traces, the convex and concave, the full and empty; the mold
Body Molds make associations with materials like plaster, earth, rubber, glass, cakes, dental molds, casts, organic materials,paper, frames.
It gives associations with rebirth, wombs, Nature, footprints, sleep, positions, pause, reproduction, serials, duplicates, no exclusiveness, common use.
Body Molds will be a project of Dance performance with exhibition objects like art installations, photos and videos placed either on the stage as a backdrop of the performance, or loop videos as part of the exhibition. The idea is to perform among the installation as well as giving a separate stage performance.
The background of the artistic duo Sharmini Tharmaratnam and Krzysztof Duracjzyk.
Sharmini is a Dutch Sri Lankan British Citizen who lives in the neighbourhood of Madrid. She finished the Academy of Arts in 1989 at the Minerva of Groningen, Holland. She has lived in many places, including Holland and India. From childhood she always longed for a duo teamwork of photography art installation and dance. After many art exhibitions and dance performances and travelling around the world, she has now found the perfect teamwork at this moment for this new project.
Krzysztof Duracjzyk is a Polish photographer living in the neighbourhood of Madrid since many years.
Always on himself with his camera and bicycle, he groomed himself in a very intimate professional photographer, of either "people" and geometric scapes of architecture and designs. His daily income is related to Nature, and meeting Sharmini was the perfect connection to take the photography a step further.
Since december 2015 both have made over a hundred photos. About Sharmini's background in relation to the project of Body Molds; it is important to know that she made "mold type of forms" when doing exhibitions in Paris and Madrid at an early age and while receiving much success her "Molds of ideas" were bought by Renos Xippas from the Renos Xippas gallery in Paris and by Emilio Navarro who is currently at the CAB (Contemporary Art Museum of Burgos). Sharmini was an invited artist at the Hópitâl Ephémère in Paris in the beginning of the '90s and in ARCO, Madrid in 1991. She got invited by the prestigious Museum of Vassiviére in Limosín, France, and designed a project of Dance and Installations for it. However, circumstances made her not able to fullfill the project and the change in life made her drop exhibitions and develop dance, while for more than 20 years the project stayed in her mind and waited to find its time ripe, meanwhile travelling the world as a dancer and developing connections with the project through "Site Specific" shows and elaborating stage sculptures, stage design with film projections and sculpture like dresses made out of paper and natural materials. During this period she took to a small Benq camera of video and started an online project of "Everyday Performances" publishing on her Fan page of FB as an experiment of making small clips. Some of the clips got published by CTXT (Contexto Online Newsfeed owned by Miguel Arturo Mora). She felt some of the clips were like " moving photos". She would like to present the possibility to "loop" small films and present them as a moving photo in a frame.For her dance project "Rewind Fast Forward" that started in 2012, she used loops of the "Every day performances" in a elaborated form as a backdrop of the show.
After making her videos she came across the work of Maya Duran and found a connection as Maya also worked film from a dancers' point of view. Slow movement of Butoh from Japan and her own Asian background also in Kathak Dance, Martial Arts, and Yoga makes her perfect as a patient model for Krzysztof. Sharmini, as a teenager, was inspired by "Arte Povera" of Giuseppe Penone, Mario Merz, Jannis Kounellis,Nam June Paik, Christian Boltanski and Joseph Beuys,and most of all Louise Bourgeois work related to Nature, Installation Poetry, Performance. Krzysztof has made a living from working with Nature and is inspired by it for his photographic work.
With a natural sense of esthetics and minimalism, he looks for photos that tell more. Sometimes his photos look like photoframes of a movie, a dream, that relates to known circumstances but look surreal, profound. The image of Sharmini, molded by time and space into a narration of past and present, presence of feminin movement and inner stillness, foreign influences and hints to childhood playing... it might be all that together that is resulting in a series of interesting work.
Their collection of photos is wide, with themes in the exterior and interior. For "Body Molds" mostly indoors photos will be used.
dress and seed-necklace by Sharmini
"Body Molds" by Sharmini,the dancer;
Equiped with the bagadge of a Dutch education in the land of Contemporary Dance and in India with all the classical traditional dance forms and in relation to gurus of age old lineaje, and contemporary looking martial arts, she looks for a form of expression that doesn´t fit in molds. Her multi-culturalism and multi disciplinair education just doesn´t adopt to fit in molds, yet her own intimity and search for identity might long for personal molds. As a Yoga teacher she trains people to connect with the inner self. She looks thus also in her body language to express herself without restrictions, preconceived forms. Improvisation is the method to be able to come to an analized, grounded language. The theory, and fixation, registration and recognition of a structure comes after. Sharmini combines asian flexibility with graceful expressive hands and feet and physical strenght with expressive strenght. Being trained for years in Kathak dance, the way body "talks" is trained a lot. Generaly speaking, Indian classical dances are a chain of "perfect photos" some dances are more a "photo-story book" while others like Kathak go from Photo to Photo in a more fluid way. The aspect of Dance Theater is more present than only the Dance as pure Dance. As a choreographer of Kathak dance, Sharmini was especially interested in the abstract form of rhythmic dance of Kathak, with its geometrical forms and patterns and complicated music. Now, she has come to a point where the absence of music is almost as interesting, the way Kathak makes its own music with the feet is now also taken to the whole body music. No external music is needed. Paper and leaves and wood and even own body structure can make its own sound. Sharmini makes her own sound scapes mixing real time sound with pre recorded sound. Text is also used.
https://vimeo.com/165692379
Presentation of BODY MOLDS, a work in progress:
-Photo and art installation; permanent and ephimere work
-Stage performance with filmscreen
stharmaratnam@hotmail.com
