Artist Statement
As an artist, I work with sculpture, dance-based performance, and advanced technology to research the relationship between the body and memory. I study haptic memory – the memory specific to ‘touch’ stimuli – and consider how the body internalizes its environment and significant life events. With this approach, I study how the human body becomes a living document, storing tension, movement patterns, and emotion over the course of a lifetime. In dance-based performance, I develop ways of documenting the body as its strength and abilities change. I weave together visceral movement with operatic vocalizations to excavate embodied memories. In my sculptural practice, I work with 3D modeling software to create objects that appear slow-moving and soft, shaped by their dynamic surroundings. Working digitally, these sculptures attempt to visualize abstract bodily sensations, like pain and analgesia. Engaging two media that seem diametrically opposed, body and software, I test the limits of both in an attempt to capture the constant push-and-pull between the body, memory, and the force that controls them: Time. Bridging movement research with my sculptural practice, I further examine whether the body can be healed by its surroundings. With installations, I study how designed environments, from temple gardens to hospitals, enable the body to enter states of meditative and energetic healing. With these studies, I create altars. These altars bridge narrative medicine theory with Hindu-Buddhist spiritual architecture not only to honor the body and memory, but also to actively facilitate ease in the body, creating opportunities for somatic healing. In doing so, the altars I create serve to heal the traumatized body. My artwork and research is ultimately an attempt to understand the resilience and malleability of the body, and to find ways to continuously support its inner healing mechanisms.
Offerings of Sleepless Surrender (2021) Dance-on-film. Directed, Choreographed, & Performed by Smita Sen. Cinematography by Juan Matos. Music: Improvisation in Yaman. Trina Basu, violin; Amali Premawardhana, cello. From Karavika's album, Sunrise.
Bio
Smita Sen is an artist working with sculpture, dance-based performance, and advanced technology to research how the body internalizes its environment and significant life events. Sen has had solo exhibitions at Recess (2021) and the Brooklyn Public Library (2022). Sen’s work has been shown internationally in Dubai, U.A.E, and at venues like Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY), Flux Factory (Long Island City, NY), Anthology Film Archives (New York, NY), and ISSUE Project Room (Brooklyn, NY). Sen has been in-residence at the Bakehouse Arts Complex (2022), Recess (2021), Mildred’s Lane (2018), and received the Instigator Fellowship from New York University ITP Camp (2018). She is a recipient of the Ellies Creator Award from Oolite Arts (2022) and a member of NEW INC, the New Museum's incubator (2022-2023). She has given talks and workshops at Columbia University, Bard College, NYU ITP Camp, and LRLX NY. An educator, Sen believes in the power of a collaborative classroom and, from 2019 to 2022, was teaching and designing the Emerging Media program as a full-time Faculty member at Choate Rosemary Hall. She currently teaches at the Parsons School of Design, The New School, while leading Miami-based arts education nonprofit, the Manipura Care Network. As a designer, Sen has worked for Discovery Communications, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, and the Urban Design Lab at Columbia University. She was the co-founding Creative Director of Into the Shell, an installation created by a studio collective of artists and engineers. Sen holds a BA in the Visual Arts (Magna Cum Laude) from Columbia University (2016). She is based in Miami, Florida and New York City.
www.smitaksen.com