Bioscope

garima thakur
(Portland, OR)

Bioscope

LOCATION DETAILS
Saturday, Sept, 10, 5:00–6:00 pm, Pacific Northwest College of Art, 511 NW Broadway, Portland, OR

Sunday, Sept. 11, 11:30 am–2:00 pm, India Connection, 17235 NW Corridor Ct #12, Beaverton, OR 97006

Tuesday, Sept. 13, 10:30 am–12:30 pm, Grendel's Coffee House, 729 E Burnside St # 107

Saturday, Sept. 17, 8:00–9:30 pm, PICA, 15 NE Hancock St.

ACCESS NOTES
People who have trouble with bending or issues with knees will have a hard time accessing the piece. Wheelchair Accessible.

DESCRIPTION
Shame is a toy house you get from your mother. Going inside it teaches you the limits of your body-—it shrinks you and folds you in on yourself. Your cheeks flush, you start feeling small, stomach and anus tighten as you attune to the curvature of yourself.* Upon stepping outside of the house and into the colony square, you find everyone’s gossip on offer, your body expanding beyond its physical bounds and into others’ eyes. They peek into your shame and you peek into theirs.

Bioscope is a traveling video sculpture that incorporates recorded personal interviews, familial theatrics, snippets of Bollywood movies, and performances about the meat and contours of shame.

*Vikramaditya Sahai

ABOUT THE ARTIST
garima thakur is a friend, interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator who is all over the place. She was raised during the ’80’s and ’90’s in New Delhi, India, a country forever recovering from a colonial hangover—teetering between an aspirational Western identity and a nationalistic one. To help soothe the hangover, she moved to the United States in 2008. Over the last 14 years she has merged installation, video, code, and text to make the bureaucratic structures of immigration visible and critique the alienation they impart. She looks up to Black feminism as a way to crack open the problems of Indian respectability politics and more deeply understand gender, sexuality, and queerness in her practice. She loves to share meals together and wishes you would hit her up for some snax. Her work has received support from organizations like the Ford Family Foundation, the Oregon Arts Commission, Khoj, and the Regional Arts & Culture Council.