The People

DESCRIPTION: A collage of some of the submitted artworks, comprising of layered images, notes and sketches. It includes the pseudonyms of all the participating artists - ‘Gulla, Haribo,Jeisi Amawasa,Khwabida, Lavendar Hippo,Loki,Misfit Medusa, Morty Smith,Shams,Street Store Dolls,Z’ and the names of core team members - ‘Aakriti, Charulatha, Suchaita and Karen’. The names are typed in black cursive font on taped strips and are placed at different areas of the image.
CORE TEAM
Karen D’Mello
Dreamer. Facilitator.
​
Charulatha Dasappa
Project Manager. Ideator. Facilitator.
​
Suchaita Tenneti
Dramaturg. Researcher. Facilitator. Content Writer.
​
Aakriti Chandervanshi
Visual Designer. Website Developer. Photographic Documentation. Creative Content Creator.
​
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
These are the pseudonyms and bios of our participating artists:
Jeisi Amawasa
Jeisi Amawasa is a lawyer and artist who is making baby steps in figuring out how to use art as a means of social change.
Lavendar Hippo
Lavendar Hippo is a Female, Dalit Theatre maker, actor and Theatre facilitator from Bangalore. Her goal in the theatre is to create meaningful, exciting and impactful conversations with the help of performances. Most of her previous work is centered on collaboration and sexual identity. She believes that the world runs on collaborations and stories and the ultimate collaboration is the theatre and remains optimistic about what the future holds for the theatre.
Khwabida
Khwabida is a Literature and Art enthusiast, not of any specific art form, but whatever speaks to Khwabida's soul. Urdu Poet, Feminist and a firm believer of a 'live and let live' way of life. A fiercely independent individual coming from a small town conservative family, being a rebel and not conforming to the norms is what Khwabida's life has been all about.
Loki
Loki identifies as a cis-gendered woman belonging to upper caste location. Being a lawyer by education and dancer by training has caused many intersections to happen for her.
Presently, Loki is trying to explore the pedagogy of classical dance training and designing a new curriculum in classical arts, and also curating an arts programme for children in education. She is very interested in the politics of the form and its history. Loki is extremely interested in inter-disciplinary approaches, methods and collaborations that provide space and agency for her co-creators and audiences.
Misfit Medusa
Misfit Medusa lives and practices in Bangalore/Mysore. She is a self-taught artist and illustrator by night and a professor of English by day.
She works with diverse materials, both traditional and digital to speak about politics, gender, identity and sexuality. Her recent explorations have been in the field of digital collages dealing with subjects such as body dysmorphia and menstrual health.
Morty Smith
Morty Smith is a 22 year old female dancer and artist. She is intrigued by the unfathomable yet fundamental aspects of life such as love, violence, greed, despair, pain etc.
Above all, she cares greatly about how she can live her life without causing much harm of any kind. Morty Smith also has a small business called EekaFika for handmade wire jewellery.
Shams
Shams has a million hobbies that she does half-well that define her, but career-wise they're a journalist. They're also Muslim, and queer, and generally love photography and printmaking.
Gulla
Gulla’s artistic practice deals with issues of disembodiment and alienation with digital communication systems and its correlation to mental and physical health in our current contemporary techno-capitalist society. Using humour, her work draws inspiration from personal experiences. She works with Sound, Video, Performance and Drawing on paper.
Street Store Dolls
Street Store Dolls aka The Mannequin is a celebrated spoken word poet who is at the forefront of the burgeoning Bangalore poetry scene. Alongside sharing the stage with eminent personalities like Shashi Tharoor, Sarah Kay among others, he has mentored more than 100 student poets across the country.
Z
Z began writing poetry as a way to stay grounded through exploring her own thoughts and feelings. She observes that in her writing practice she tries to go deeper into the nature of what unsettles and what uplifts her, and attempts to express it in a way that is honest, specific and minimalist.
Haribo
A 19-year-old miniaturist from Kolkata brought up in Bangalore, Haribo is most proficient in the language of clay, and also dabbles in drawing, sketching, needlepoint, threadwork, woodwork, paper manipulations and mixed media. Haribo's currently studying design and hopes to pursue set design and decoration in stop-motion and other films.
​
See-Saw would have been impossible without these artists’ curiosity and willingness to engage with our prompts, and share a part of their journey with us. For that and more, we are incredibly grateful to (in no particular order):
H.R Shradha Raj
Lynessa Coutto
Priyanka Chandrasekhar
Sangeetha Alwar
Sruthi
Kruthika NS
Rafia Zainab
Seher Dareen
Tasneem Lohani
Ahona Mukherjee
Daniel Sukumar
​
​
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
​
We are so grateful to Shiva Pathak for her invaluable support and inputs, Sandbox Collective and Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore for making See-Saw possible.
The Core Team would also like to thank the following people for supporting and helping make this project what it is:
Devika Sundar for Web Accessibility Research and Support
Sunayana Premchander and Ayesha Susan Thomas of KathaSiyah
Anoop Unnikrishnan for the Music and Audio Compilation
​
Asim Siddiqui
Rishikesh Dasappa
Sanjana Takru
Rupali Zalke
Nisha Abdulla
Vinay Kumar
Ginger, the cat
Bindu Menon
Anupama Dasappa
Vyjayanthi Bano, the ginger cat
Aarti Singh
​