Author: Amaara Raheem
Amaara Raheem is a Sri Lankan born Australian choreographer, performer, researcher and writer who works in the edge-lands of contemporary performance, dance, and interior design. She migrated to Melbourne after the 1983 riots in her birth-land, Colombo, Sri Lanka, grew up in Melbourne, moved to London where she lived fifteen years, and in 2015, returned to Australia. Amaara lives part time in Melbourne and part time in The Northern Grampians (regional Victoria) where she is setting up a body of work with artist, Mick Douglas on socially immersive life-art practices in relation to their property in Black Range Scenic Reserve, exploring their differently complex relationships to histories of colonisation lived in the body in relation to country, and the everyday systems of living and growing food in 40 acres in the country.
Since 2005 Amaara has been making solo and collaborating in group works that have been presented in leading theatres, galleries, and museums all over the world. In 2017 she collaborated with curator, Camila Marambio to make ’Meth(odological) Lab: Making TIME’ as part of the survey exhibition of the Swedish duo Goldin+Senneby, Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane). 'Meth(odological) Lab: Making TIME’ is part homeopathic experiment, part occupation of space in order to hypothesise and develop a formula (and a scent) for making TIME. Another key project that has shaped her thinking on land, body and time is working ongoingly with French choreographer, Xavier Le Roy. She has performed in his work, Temporary Title, 2015 at Carriageworks, Sydney (2015), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016), Tanzplatfform, Essen (2018). In 2015 Amaara undertook a travelling artist’s residency 'Twenty-three Days at Sea' curated by Access Gallery sailing from Vancouver to Shanghai aboard a cargo ship, and made a body of work in response to this passage as part of group show at Access Gallery, Va. In 2017 she was awarded a ‘Responsive Residency’ at Critical Path (2017) in dialogue with neurosurgeon interrogating brain-body pathways and through this work hands emerged as a site of knowing / know-how. Most recently Amaara was part of a group experiment ‘Writing In The Expanded Field’ produced by ACCA, reframing art criticism in relation to multiple modes of writing. She have published a number of artist-essays in Performance Research Journal, and is completing a practice-based PhD in School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University, within Interior Design. In 2018 Amaara collaborated on ‘Wind Meeting’ with three Interior Designers, meeting wind in a duration performance installation set up in a shipping container at The Performance Arcade, Wellington, 2018.
Multiple homes, multiple identities, multiple belongings, multiple modes of practice fuse through all her work.
