Priya

The new film Priya, shot on 16mm, observes from overhead a woman in a rapturous dance. The woman’s white dress swirls in the air as her raised arms circle past the screen, setting the steady pace of her dizzying, hypnotic whirl. Loud colors and lights pulsate over her in an unmitigated frenzy, suggesting the ecstatic vertigo that she feels in her dance.

Priya and the photographic series of the same name are created from 16mm film that has been buried in Syed’s garden, wrapped in combinations of leaves, earth and bio degradable waste from her kitchen. This collaboration with nature and time has contributed and erased, producing the unexpected. The dark and evocative works are the traces left from repeated entombments, subtly suggesting past histories and visualizing time and memory.