Exercises in belonging: Longing in the Hills was a two-part performance done at Healing Hill Art Space, Morni Hills, Haryana. This was part of Art Maharaj: A Project in the Hills, a residency program to honour the memory of Shantanu Lodh, one of the pioneers of performance art in India.

Continuing the enquiry into the markers of belonging and embodiment of longings, the two episodes drew from personal memory and responded to the geography of the site. In the first performance, I engage in a ritualistic revealing of a rubber tyre, at a site at the tip of a hill. The viewers are invited towards the site where a circle is made out of bundles of grass. The plane inside the circle is used for the reveal and movements that follow. Memories that involve the rubber, material of the tyre, the hilly terrain inform the ritualised movements.

In the second episode, I disappear into the folds of the land, to emerge with images drawn on a long fabric and try to find solace on the slope of the hill.