Varsha Bhide bangaloREsident-Expanded@Experimental Radio
Varsha Bhide is an artist based in Bangalore. She studied visual arts from the College of Fine Arts, Bangalore and has specialised in painting. She has worked with varied and diverse media such as installation, performance, programming and print making. She uses different media and materials for each project. The subject matter of each project determines that factor. In 2013, she was part of a Bangalore-based artist collective called 080-loopholes during which time she created large-scale site-specific installations and performances around the city. Varsha also has an ongoing project called OSA (One square inch of art) in which there are 1"X1" plastic modules with notches at the corners and the edges. OSAs come together in various ways. OSAs inhabit and interact with their surroundings and are in constant flux. OSAs have been displayed as part of the Double Road project in Munich and Festival of Stories in Bangalore.
Varsha was also part of the Kochi-Muziris Students Biennale 2018. She is currently pursuing print making from Bangalore University.
“I like to treat art as an unpredictable source of information. It has the power to open new ideas. While I use a variety of materials and process in each project, my methodology is consistent. My immediate milieu is my source of inspiration. During research and production, new ideas and concepts arise and lead to the next bodies of work. Each medium and material is like a lesson for me. My art practice shifts between material engagement, public intervention, performance, installation, print making and painting.”
At Experimental Radio, Munich, she will be working on an interactive audio installation: A Symphony for Call-Outs. Each audio snippet has a QR code mapped to it and the viewer will randomly scan a QR sequence which in turn generates a symphony. Also, to give the viewer a visual experience, an image sequence is projected. The image sequence is not random but is dependent on the frequencies of the audio snippet.
My residency was at Experimental Radio in Munich. My project was about audio, particularly recordings from the street hawkers of Bangalore. The "callouts" which were organic all these years but are now being replaces be speakers, signify is a change in tradition. I was very inspired by the experimental music scene in Munich and the project took shape by remixing the callouts with experimental sounds. Alongside was an audio interactive video coded in Touch Designer, reacting like hair cells. A connection to how a street hawker associates a relationship with his customers.