Sonam Chaturvedi

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Explorations will bring together artists who are friends in potluck sessions in order to compile a lexicon of multilingual terms and neologisms that point to the disruptions caused by digital screens in our everyday lives, including our sleeping and eating habits with a special focus on the deferral of the night. Sonam Chaturvedi is the Coordinator for this project. 

Sonam Chaturvedi is a contemporary artist who divides her time between Baroda, New Delhi and Sonipat. She is a Lecturer at the OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat since 2019. Sonam completed her MFA from Shiv Nadar University, Noida and BFA in Sculpture from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. She has been a recipient of FICA Public Art Grant (2021), Five Million Incidents by Goethe Institut (2019) and Artreach India’s Teaching Fellowship, to work with the kids of the Salaam Baalak Trust (NGO) in 2017. In 2018, she participated in a month-long residency at Kammari Residency- space for experimental thinking and arts, Treis Elies, Cyprus. Given her experience, she is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

This project is titled Rāk/Raak: Lexicon by the Screenlight, where Rāk/Raak is a neologism meaning the glow in a space, especially on the face of a person due to a digital device’s screen light. It is derived from Raat (night), Spark and Raakh (Ashes). The project aims to create a lexicon of usages that denote the disruptions caused by ubiquitous digital devices to everyday lives, including changes to the circadian rhythms of people who are addicted to screens. The project will specifically focus on how we have started deferring the night as we get deeper into our digital worlds. The creation of this lexicon is instigated by a feeling that our existing vocabulary is unable to keep up with the momentum through which the digital interface has intervened in our social, political, economic, cultural, personal, and emotional realities. This will be created through late night potluck sessions with invited artists who are friends, in Baroda and Delhi. The lexicon will traverse the textual structure of a dictionary and build into an evolving repository composed of visuals and audio alongside the text, in multiple languages, including English.

The outcomes of the project will be five potluck sessions and a larger session to conclude the project, an artist’s book, and the web tool of the lexicon. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be audio/visual documentation of the potluck sessions, a copy of the artist’s book, and an offline version of the web tool. 

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it investigates changes in language realities due to the invasion of the digital medium and attempts to collect them artistically.   

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.