Rajyashri Goody, Sri Vamsi Matta
The act of eating traces and retraces borders. While in some instances food transcends borders, in others it sets unbending boundaries as to what food should constitute, and who you can eat with. Discerning these borders within art practices that look at foodscapes can help us understand its transformative nature.
Join Rajyashri Goody and Sri Vamsi Matta as they illustrate and speak about their work in documenting the tangible and intangible borders defined by food in relation to caste. And how for Dalits, the cooking and consumption of food can act and function as markers of solidarity and belonging, as well as exclusion.
Artist
Rajyashri Goody is from Pune, India. She lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Goody completed her BA in Sociology at Fergusson College in Pune in 2011, and an MA in Visual Anthropology at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, England in 2013.
Goody’s art practice is informed by her academic background and her Ambedkarite roots. Through writing, ceramics, photography, and sculpture, she attempts to decode and make visible instances of everyday power and resistance within Dalit communities in India.
In July 2018, she had a solo show, Eat With Great Delight, at Clark House Initiative, Mumbai. Selected group exhibitions include New Natures: A Terrible Beauty is Born, Goethe Institut, Mumbai, 2022; Hungry For Time, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria, 2021; At The Kitchen Table, 1 Shanthiroad, Bengaluru, 2021; Imprint After at Pulp Society, New Delhi, 2020; Sunnata Samanta at Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi, 2020; and Look Outside This House at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, 2019 among others. Her work has also been presented at literature festivals in India.
Goody is currently an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. In 2018, she was awarded the Emerging Artist Award by India Today.
Theatre Artist
Sri Vamsi Matta is a Bengaluru-based theatre artist who has been involved with the theatre fraternity for over a decade. What started out as a hobby during his undergraduate years at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, soon became a significant occupation, and then a full-time profession for Matta. His practice is influenced by his Dalit identity, experience and location, which inform the questions, topics and mediums he engages with.
His latest projects include Star in the Sky, written as part of Indian Ensemble’s First Draft programme, which looks at the experience of Dalit students in Indian universities, and explores questions of pain, identity, discrimination, death, grief and memory. He has also received a grant as part of the IFA 25×25 initiative, for a project called Dear Internet: a collection of unsent letters from individuals belonging to under-represented, marginalised, and minority communities of the Indian subcontinent, articulating their bittersweet relationship with the Internet. In late 2021 as an exploration of stories about caste and its relationship with food, he began working on a performance piece called Come Eat with Me, which has now received the Refunction grant by the Goethe Institute India.
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