Date with The Archive: Sensorial Body, Body Memory, Narrative, and Archive | A Presentation by Navtej Singh Johar | March 29, 2022

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA)
invites you to the first
Date with The Archive:
Sensorial Body, Body Memory, Narrative, And Archive
A Presentation by Navtej Singh Johar

Tuesday, March 29, 2022 | 06:30 PM – 07:30 PM IST | Zoom and Facebook Live

Who engages with an archive? Can the archive be a space beyond scholarly pursuits? Can it open itself to other forms of exploration?

Join us for an evening of discussion around an archive’s potential for artistic experimentation. Being a dancer and a yoga practitioner, Navtej Singh Johar’s medium has been the sensory-body. His choreography has examined conditionings that are a result of received truths that have been taken from texts, narratives, memories, lived-histories, as well as the archive. In his presentation, Navtej will feature four of his works that talk about constructed nationalistic notions that classify art into ‘high’ and ‘low’; the attraction and revulsion that abounds in unequal power relations between the master and the servant; and the appropriation of narratives of freedom.  He will also talk about the ways in which the reconstruction of history pertaining to dance and yoga has affected the perception, practice and pedagogy of these two practices. And how the archive of texts, and more importantly living-traditions helped in countering these nationalistically imagined histories.

Navtej Singh Johar is a dancer and choreographer, scholar, yoga practitioner, and urban activist.

Launched in 2018, The IFA Archive is a space that holds the diverse materials of the projects supported and implemented by IFA over the years, currently featuring materials from 372 projects online at http://www.theifaarchive.org/

Date with The Archive is a series of talks by artists across different practices who have used archives extensively for their creative work, to bring to focus the potential of the archive as a significant resource for artistic explorations. 

The IFA Archive is built with support from the Indorama Charitable Trust.

Click here to register for the discussion on Zoom.

The discussion will also be streamed live on our Facebook page, for which no prior registration is required.