CENTERING JOY
AN INVITATION TO BE NON-PRODUCTIVE
with Nandita Raman
9TH JANUARY 2025
11AM – 3PM
REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED
Photography is blessed and cursed with generating representation–showing a people, describing a memory, exhibiting a place. Framing is a dance in which by including we exclude, and by omitting we embrace. A photographer carefully slices out an image from the multi-dimensional space in front of us. Quite similarly and inadvertently we continuously represent ourselves. We perform a photographer, a lover, a child, a parent…BUT like the unsliced space we too are multi- voluminous.
During our time together we will make space to remember this expansiveness of our being. We will remind ourselves that we aren’t small, fragmented or lacking in anything. Even though our life might demand that we enclose ourselves in roles, underneath it we are in excess of all these roles we perform.
This retreat is an invitation to discover who we are outside of the framework of production. Body movements inspired by Qigong and T’ai chi ch’üan and meditation will help us slowdown so we can step out of the sympathetic mode of fight and flight and sink into the parasympathetic state where all our body functions are at full capacity.
We will take some time away from our minds, which is where we live when we are thinking, problem solving, planning. This is also a part of our being where we experience anxiety, panic and hastiness. These are all human reactions and while we may need them on very specific occasions, we don’t need to live in them.
Coming to our body is a way of arriving in the present moment. We will inhabit the moment and bask in the joy of its fullness.
– NANDITA RAMAN
Image used in the visual : Twilight 2, 2015-2024
Courtesy © Nandita Raman
Schedule
11am : Introductions
11:15 : Module 1
– Body Movement
– Meditation
1 pm : Lunch Break
2-3pm- Discussion: Pragmatics of Practicing Joyfully
Through discussion and exercises we will explore how we could reorient ourselves towards joy and reimage the metrics of success, validity and time.
Nandita Raman is interested in crafting opportunities that brings respite from the demands of self-consciousness by creating occasions for ease and expansive being.
Her work has been exhibited at George Eastman Museum, Museum of Moving Images, Duke University, Columbia University and Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai.
Her work is published in MIT Press’s Performance Art Journal, the Documenta14’s South as a State of Mind, New York Times and the Hindu. She has curated exhibitions in New York and Varanasi.
Nandita studied in the Bard College–International Center of Photography program. She was appointed Associate Professor of Photography at Rhode Island School of Design in 2021, and taught at SUNY Purchase College previously. She teaches in Photography Expanded Fellowship focused on climate, for the Magnum Foundation. Nandita is studying Acupuncture and practices meditation. She finds remarkable overlaps between these and creative practices.
Nandita’s portrait by Shrinkhla Agarwal.
Offset Projects 