The Black Mamba (Natasha Mendonca and Suman Sridhar)

Artists, India

  • Natasha Mendoca +

    Filmmaker, India

    Natasha Mendonca is a filmmaker and electronic musician from Bombay, India. S/he holds a Masters in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has shown at the Museum of Modern Art NYC, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern and Sesc VideoBrasil. Her films have won several international awards including the Tiger award at IFFR 2011, a residency prize at the Wexner Centre.

    Learn more: www.natashamendonca.com

  • Suman Sridhar +

    Singer, India

    Suman Sridhar, singer, composer, performer, raised between Mumbai and New Jersey. She is trained in Bharat Natyam Classical dance, Indian Classical music and has a degree in Western Classical Music and Visual Art from Rutgers University, USA. She has sung chart-topping songs for Bollywood films. Her forthcoming album had a world preview at the Tate Modern museum, London. The Black Mamba inaugurated the 20th Contemporary Arts Festival, VideoBrasil_Sesc, Sao Paulo (2017) and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2016).

    Learn more: www.youtube.com

Olamidutal / Land of the Breasted Woman

The Land of the Breasted Woman is an immersive live video and sound performance. The project documents and traces the historical and contemporary practices of ritual mourning in South India. The multi-disciplinary project is at the thresholds of ethnomusicology, cinema, poetry, gender studies and post-colonial studies. The performance of lament, a South Indian oral form of ritual mourning is performed on the anniversary of the funeral of Nangeli – a fierce female character from the 18th century history of Kerala, India, who sacrificed her life in protest of the Breast Tax Law enforcing lower caste women to pay tax in order to cover their bodies in public.

The Black Mamba was in residence at the Camargo Foundation in 2019, as part of the Core Program.