Surabhi Saraf

Surabhi Saraf creates audio-visual experiences, ethereal soundscapes, collective research, and performances situated as workshops and rituals for holistic thinking in a digital age. She uses these methodologies as entry points to make sense of our algorithmic existence and its effects on our knowledge, emotions, and bodies. Saraf, along with artists from her collective research project the ‘Centre for Emotional Materiality,’ recently staged a performance at SFMOMA that included her video works along with an interactive installation designed to explore the potential of undirected group action around an organizing entity: A giant blob of clay. When did you last make time to meditate around a blob of clay with your family and friends? What conversations would arise? What anxieties would melt away?

Surabhi Saraf is a media artist, composer and founder of Centre for Emotional Materiality. Her practice explores our complex relationship with technology using embodiment as a tool and the body as a site for transformation. Surabhi is the recipient of the Eureka Fellowship Award by the Fleishhacker Foundation (2015), the Djerassi Resident Artist Award (2012) and the Artist + Process + Ideas Residency at Mills College Art Museum (2016). She was a 2019 Technology Resident at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and 2020 resident at HarvestWorks, NY.

She has had solo exhibitions at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai and Hosfelt gallery in San Francisco. She has performed at the Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennial, Greece, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, NETMAGE 10 International Live Media Festival (Bologna), and Soundwave Biennial ((5)), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Her videos have been shown at TIMES SQUARE, New York, Blanton Museum, Austin, the Hunter Museum of American Art Chattanooga, TN among others. Surabhi lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Images:
1) Alaap, 2022 (Excerpt 2)
2) Clay Blob
3) Surabhi Saraf with Clay Blob
4) Clay Blob at SFMOMA