Poulomi Desai is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. She is self-taught and for over 30 years, has been involved in performance, live art, sound and photography installations interrogating the politics of identity, listening and perception, inspired by her activist and DIY post punk background. She subverts broken sitars into new electronic instruments for improvised performance, melding circuit bent toys, modified cassette decks, optikinetic instruments, kitchen knives, axes and massage tools. She works with collage, field recordings, VLF radio noise, petri dish bacterial photography and ideas of ‘electromagnetic black noise’, embracing chance, loss of control and questioning 'authenticity'. Recent haptic works are part of the Heritage Quay / British Music Collection archives where she was a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow and is an Oram Award recipient. Exhibitions include The Serpentine Gallery, Autograph ABP, The Science Museum London, Habitat India and The Baltic. She co-founded Shakti, the first South Asian LGBTQ+ club and organisation, the NAZ HIV/AIDs project, and HAC - the punk art, Asian performance company in the 80s and runs the Usurp Art Charity, supporting outsider artists.
