Poulomi Desai: The Oram Awards 2020
Poulomi Desai is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. She is self-taught and for over 30 years, has been involved in performance, live art, sound and photography installations interrogating the politics of identity, listening and perception, inspired by her activist background and DIY post punk. She subverts broken sitars into new augmented instruments for improvised performance, melding collage, VLF radio noise, circuit bending, petri dish photography and ideas of ‘electromagnetic black noise’ in her work.
Recent haptic works are part of the Heritage Quay / British Music Collection archives where she was a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow. Under Covid restrictions, she has been exploring the mini-oramics instrument (made by Tom Richards) using data from pandemics, migration and financial markets. She co-founded: Shakti, the first South Asian LGBTQ+ organisation, the NAZ HIV/AIDs project, and HAC – the punk art, Asian performance company in the 80s and runs the Usurp Art Charity.