Asha Sheshadri

Friday, November 1st, ISSUE presents an expansive gathering of NYC artists working across disciplines. Cellist/composer Leila Bordreuil and guitarist/composer Lee Ranaldo debut an improvised duet, and are then joined by sound artist Stephan Moore, presenting a new collaboration that embarks from their previous trio performance at ISSUE in 2016. Artist Asha Sheshadri stages a new iteration of her essayistic performance practice -- a hybrid process that commingles memory construction, questions of citation and translation, and lost or silenced histories and diasporas. The New York Review of Cocksucking, the ecstatic duo of Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman (members of 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Queer Trash), also perform.

Asha Sheshadri’s work involves the unpredictable observation of and response to a personal and political network of relays -- archival fields coexisting in entropy -- that operate within our collective worlds and imperfect memories. She describes that reading annotations from a book marked up by another, capturing an observational voice memo on a phone, or salvaging footage from a damaged tape are gestures that may produce source material for a fictional letter, a suggestion of an ethnography, soundtrack, or map of a speculated immigration. These, in turn, may result in a composition, an object, a movement or manifesto. Her work, often taking the form of essayistic videos, recordings, readings, and performances, follows these relays towards creating environments from musical and non-musical artifacts alike -- a kind of "affective collaging” concerned with the personal deconstruction and re-assemblage of archival objects and documents.

Asha Sheshadri is a New York based artist. Her multivalent work commingles memory construction, questions of citation and translation, and lost or silenced histories and diasporas. In her essayistic videos, recordings and performances, she layers her own voice with original writing, text sourced from found documents, places, and people she admires, creating environments of musical and non-musical artifacts alike. She was an affiliated fellow at the American Academy of Rome, earned an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and is an alum of the Whitney Independent Study Studio program. Her work has been exhibited and performed at spaces including Artists’ Space, Vox Populi, and the MIT List Visual Arts Center. To date, her recordings have been released on Further Records, Entr’acte, and Recital Program, with a forthcoming work to be released on the Anomia imprint.