Je dak kothao Pouche na (Calls that reach nowhere)
6-channel HD video with 6 x Stereo sound, colour, 9:16 with 10 classical musicians and 2 dancers
Commissioned by Serendipity Arts Festival, 2024
Installation shot, where the spirit meets the bone, Dhaka, 2025
Courtesy: Where the spirit meets the bone
Installation shot, Serendipity Arts Festival, 2024
Courtesy: Krishna Javeri
Photo: Hadiuddin
Voices that whisper on the margins of complex geopolitical locations are governed by majoritarianism based on religion, diaspora and geographies. Their tonalities are drowned in the din of politics. How are these unheard and unreachable voices repositioned, reclaimed, and reconfigured?
In Reetu Sattar’s work Je Dak Kothao Pouche Na (Calls that reach nowhere), various forms of sounds have been selected to accommodate the feeling of desertedness as a marginal community. The artist considers these sounds as accompaniments to Hindustani classical music and also mundane everyday practices of gestures, chores and routines.By bringing together a specificity of context with the banality of everyday sounds, Sattar investigates the idea of togetherness as a noise that fails to reach anyone. These sound accompaniments embody a moment of absurd reach and a catharsis of the established binary of marginal voices to power. The besura (distune) or betala (no rhythm) and the anonymity of the bodies resist the politics of erasure and emerge as a union noise of movement and resistance. Please watch here.