Shanta Rao

Visual Artist (France)

Shanta Rao (French-Indian. Lives and works in Paris) reroutes the trajectory of originary forms. The cyclical nature of re-approaching the primary state of a code or a pixel disrupts the idea of finitude to welcome a reflection of evolution and becoming. Using an at once computerized and physical process as a territory of mutation, she injects instability into the status of sources—text, sound and image—and the possibility for them to pursue itineraries freed from their original field and to propagate in new forms: pixels act as particles hitting copper plates; flat ink absorbs dot-matrix images; digitized Hertzian frequencies turn into soft matter; drawing gestures become video signals; musical compositions emboss and perforate rubber and silicon surfaces; literary texts become numerical signs, and then pictorial abstractions. Functioning in an autonomous way, as part of installations, her art is a combinational practice located at the point of convergence between the abstraction of digital coding and the concrete world. It opens to the question of the origin and the biological program in which it would be possible to re-inject ambivalence and possibility.

Learn more: www.shantarao.net

YANTRA (working title)

Following the developments in her work, including an installation project initiated from the literary work "Flatland" (Edwin A. Abbott, 1884), her research project at the Camargo Foundation proposed a navigation through forms that draws upon its origin in experimental music and explored the possible mutations between sound frequencies, graphic representations and matter.

Shanta Rao was in residence at the Camargo Foundation in 2017, as part of the Core Program.