Dominique Baron-Bonarjee

ILINX, Voluptuous Panic

Installation #upgrade - December 2019

Material: body, wood, 3d printed plastic, gold leaf, seaweed, fungus, perspex, acrylic on canvas, ink on paper drawings, rope, leather, wig, office chair, jesmonite, glass, 4k video and sound.

Sound design with Joel Cahen

Photography | Elly Clarke

The sociologist Roger Caillois describes the game of Ilinx, meaning whirlpool. Ilinx induces a temporary vertigo and disorientation which leads to altered perception in a ‘voluptuous panic’. 

The installation space composes an immersive field for a game of ilinx. Each element belongs to an order of things, and all of them intra-act by coding their relations: the space is constructed as a geometric puzzle of animated objects – weights, measures, and membranes - shifting, breathing, observing. An immersive soundscape envelops the visitor in a composition that oscillates between gentle meditative theta sounds and anxious squealing synth frequencies. Overwhelming the space is a ‘mass ornament”, a kaleidoscopic moving image piece with hypnotic images of oceanic movement and liquidity, drenched in watery textures, that fuse the organic and the machinic in a subaquatic world of industrial symmetries and scopic seduction.

Dominique Savitri BARON-BONARJEE | IN/FR/UK

Dominique is an artist whose work functions as a question addressing the endlessly mysterious alterity that is the body: a body that is both, self-conscious identity - subject – and abstract materiality - object. The outcomes of this ‘embodied philosophy’ are her installations, performances, moving image pieces, drawings and writings. Her works propose a speculative science, both existential and experiential, that participates in an intimate relation with nonhuman agents, inciting new rites of passage for the ‘era of the Wobble’. Space of the Nameless is Dominique’s current doctoral project, within the research cohort of the Art Department, Goldsmiths University of London. Her research looks at threshold states in ‘nondual’ spiritual practices, exploring the sensorial modalities of transitional moments. She is active in Europe and Asia and has shown work at Nakanojo Biennale, the Isamu Noguchi Room (Keio University) Tokyo, Galerie Wedding in Berlin, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC); presented ‘Tales of Fabrication’ at the Tai Kwun Centre in Hong Kong (ASAP Symposium); screening at Tate Exchange, London. Her public space performances have been commissioned by Chisenhale Dance Space, London and Håb / Word of Warning in Manchester. She collaborated with Astrida Neimanis, author of ‘Bodies of Water’, for Lofoten International Arts Festival 2019