Aastha Gandhi

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Explorations will attempt to explore expressions for the haunting images of migrant bodies witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic, through a performance that is informed by and draws from legislation that governs various aspects of migration in India. Aastha Gandhi is the Coordinator for this project. 

Aastha Gandhi is a Delhi-based contemporary performance-maker, Odissi dancer, theatre and performance studies scholar, and lawyer. She completed her PhD from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, Delhi in 2022. Her thesis was titled A Critical History of Indian Circus: Negotiations with Popularity, State, and Laws (1947-2015). Aastha completed her LLB from the Institute of Law & Research, Maharishi Dayanand University, Rohtak in 2016. She participated in a summer school on the Dramaturgy of Research Creation, at Concordia University, Montreal in 2021. She was a doctoral fellow as part of the Cluster of Excellence program at FSGS, Freie University, Berlin in 2020. Given her experience, she is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

This project titled The Other - Body of the Migrant will explore the possibility of creating a dialogue between the ‘abject body’ of the migrant and legislation that affect the conditions of both interstate and international migration through a performance. The provocations of the proposed explorations are two-fold. While more recently it draws from the images of the migrants who were forced to go back to their native villages during the first phase of the pandemic in 2020, it will also be informed by the enforced migration during the Partition of the country in 1947. The performance instigated by the migrant’s endless walk towards survival will explore the physicality of the migrant body through textual, aural and digital means. 

The outcome of the project will be the performance. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be audio-visual documentation of the performance and the artistic process in the studio. 

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it experiments to give an artistic expression to questions of migration that are closely controlled by the laws of a nation state. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is made possible with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.