Strike A Pose
Goethe Institute/ BangaloREsidency 2014
in collaboration with Madhu Nataraj and the STEM Dance Kampni
Strike a Pose addresses the question of visual authorship within the global archive of movement.
The work was created in 2014 in collaboration with a STEM Dance Kampni; INDIA and begins from a structural shift: gestures that circulate in the Western visual memory as pop-cultural icons appear here as part of a centuries-old temple tradition.
The dancers did not know Madonna.
And that made me smile.
The pose existed nevertheless.
The perspective shifts. It is not the West that invents movement — movement has long been exported, transformed, decontextualised and marked as new.
I am less interested in the moral debate around appropriation than in regimes of visibility. Which bodies inscribe themselves into global iconography? Which disappear into footnotes? And which become the source without being named as such?
In the video, this shift is staged physically. Traditional Kathak structures meet a monochrome black formation. The iconic pose — the frozen, self-assured frontal image — is removed from its Western fashion and music-video context and re-situated within its ritual depth.
The work does not operate through quotation but through overlay. The body becomes an epistemic space. It carries knowledge that requires no media validation.
2014 marked a historical moment before the total synchronisation of visual platforms. Global image circulation was already a reality, yet its genealogical lines remained fragmented. Strike a Pose makes these fractures visible by embodying them rather than explaining them.
The pose becomes a political instrument. Not self-stylisation, but a claim to presence. Not surface, but a carrier of time.
Strike a Pose shifts the discussion from cultural appropriation towards a more fundamental question: how is history stored in the body, transformed, and reframed — and who holds the power to sign that history?
The work situates itself at the intersection of decolonial thought, body politics and global image economies. Movement appears here as an archive — and the archive as a contested space.
