Harpreet Singh | Biosphere as community

Harpreet Singh Biosphere as community – an open lecture

Inaugural Lecture: Harpreet Singh (India) as part of UAP Lectures with the support of the City of Poznań. Opening of the Academic Year of the Institute of Intermedia.

October 6 (Tuesday), 6:00 PM Aula Gallery, building A, Al. Marcinkowskiego 29

Harpreet Singh’s lecture will focus on the relationships between art, ecology, and local communities, which he has been developing for many years through his artistic and educational practice in India. The artist will present examples of initiatives built on collaboration with local residents, showcasing how art can serve as a tool for raising environmental awareness and strengthening ties to place. The event will offer an opportunity to reflect on how creative practices can support care for the biosphere, initiate dialogue between different forms of knowledge, and ignite bottom-up processes of cooperation.

The lecture will create a space for conversation about art as a medium connecting lived experience, research, and responsibility for our shared environment. It serves as an invitation to view human relationships with nature as a dynamic web of interdependencies—one that calls for attentiveness, collaboration, and imagination.

Harpreet Singh is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and curator whose practice brings together visual arts, performance and pedagogy. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from the College of Art in Chandigarh and a Master’s degree from Banaras Hindu University, and continued his education at Morningside College of Art in Brisbane and the University of Auckland. Alongside his artistic practice, he has taught and lectured at numerous universities and art institutions in India, including the University of Rajasthan and the College of Architecture in Chandigarh. He has participated in numerous international workshops and symposia and has collaborated with Auckland Art Gallery. He is the founder and producer of the MHPAB Morni Hills Performance Art Biennale, an event dedicated to the development of and exchange of experiences in the field of contemporary performance art.

“As a performance artist, I’m the most hybrid language in art. My body is the centre of my questioning; it is both the object of work and the subject of my research. By wanting to get to the core of these questions I enter an intense journey of discovery and expansion. Identity and belonging are always in conjunction in my practice. They somehow mean the same. As if it were through the flesh and the soil that the most profound questions regarding belonging, experience and human subjectivity could be explored. The idea of presence and non-presence, the ephemeral presence and the corporeal presence is what interests me and is what I have been investigating for the last few years. The tension between these two; the effect of looking at the body from the ephemerality of technology is changing our perception of corporeality, of our body.
My work is about transformation and change through sharing and connecting. It’s meant to be raw and subtle; intense and beautiful. I want to shake people by shaking myself. I believe the body is the most nostalgic element, the most vivid, vital, dynamic, powerful and beautiful, one where the past, present and future coexist, where life and death make synthesis, where I can find my fears and hopes, my memories and most importantly my strength, drive and spirit.
My function is being a witness. I look into life situations, which I become a casual witness in order to transfer this experience via means of artistic expression. I’m interested in the tensions within our mind and body, our inside and our outside, our feelings and what we actually express. “

Project realized with the financial support of the City of Poznań