Dhunia: Septet
Dipna Horra
A Space Main Gallery
March 8 – 31, 2012
Essay by: Christina Rousseau
A Space Gallery is please to present a solo exhibition featuring Ottawa based artist Dipna Horra’s new multi channel audio and single channel video installation, Dhunia: Septet. Through the fusion of everyday objects with sound technology and autobiography, Dhunia: Septet explores issues related to language, narrative, home, hybridity and cultural memory. The Dhunia project is a work in progress that has evolved through various stages of exhibition and development. In its current form, Dhunia: Septet is comprised of objects and a video that are connected to the home, which are subsequently embodied with feelings of “unhomeliness”. The "septet" refers to the seven channel audio composition that emanates from windows that are embedded with voice coils where sound, voice and reverberation overlap to create an uncanny and meditative atmosphere.
Biographies
Dipna Horra is a multidisciplinary artist, architect, and educator living in Ottawa, Canada. She is currently a PhD student at the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism at Carleton University. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Ottawa University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Carleton University. Horra has worked as an educator in the field of architecture and multi-media installation in New York and Canada. She has exhibited her art in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, New York City, Brooklyn, Berlin, London, and Dubai. Horra’s artistic process addresses hybridity and a transcultural synthesis of technology with materials and thoughts. Horra’s sound investigations are intersections in architecture, art and cultural studies. She works with ephemeral spaces created with autobiographical narrative, field recording, micro broadcasting, as well as hand made microphones and speakers. Through these materials she investigates ideas of hybridity, questions of displacement and transcultural identity. She blends architecture, technology and sound art to explore varied geographies and combined cultures. Her current project, Dhunia is a meditation on identity and storytelling as it crosses cultures and languages.
Christina Rousseau is an activist, dancer and PhD candidate in Humanities at York University. She is currently writing about the formation of socialist-feminist movements in the 1970s. Her approach to research is concerned with rediscovering female voices by emphasizing the importance of life writing, narratives and oral history.