Tara Fatehi Irani

As part of Bodies of Knowledge, Tara Fatehi Irani worked with the Kathak dancer Kesha Raithatha and doctoral researcher Julia Giese to lead workshops for South Asian women in Tower Hamlets and Charnwood. Using family photographs and Kathak dance, they explored how memories and practices of migration, identity and power are negotiated through gesture.

The workshops were documented via annotated Laban notation of Kathak dance, and in line drawings by David Caines. A conversation between Raithatha, Giese and Fatehi Irani reflecting on the workshops features in Bodies of Knowledge, published by Radar and the Live Art Development Agency.

Tara Fatehi Irani is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and researcher working with fabricated histories, fictionalised facts, mistranslated memories and unattended archives. Her work is primarily concerned with the ephemeral interactions between memories, words and sites and the transformation of these through performance, language and installation. She works in a range of media including performance, video, sound, installation, writing, collage and a multitude of objects. My most recent works engage with themes of displacement, translation and historical inaccuracies. Tara has performed at Royal Academy of Arts, Tate Liverpool, and SPILL Festival of Performance and Chelsea Theatre. Tara is a member of Documentation Action Research Collective (DARC), and a doctoral researcher at the University of Roehampton, London.