Surabhi Saraf is a media artist, composer, organizer and founder of Centre for Emotional Materiality. Surabhi is the recipient of the Eureka Fellowship Award by the Fleishhacker Foundation (2015), the Djerassi Resident Artist Award (2012) and the Artist + Process + Ideas Residency at Mills College Art Museum (2016). She has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai and Hosfelt gallery in San Francisco. She has performed at the Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennial, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, NETMAGE 10 International Live Media Festival (Bologna), and Soundwave Biennial ((5)), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Her videos have been shown at TIMES SQUARE, New York, Blanton Museum, Austin, the Hunter Museum of American Art Chattanooga, TN and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Vojvodina, Serbia. She was 2019 Technology Resident at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn and is a 2020 resident at Harvestworks, New York.
My practice explores our complex relationship with technology using embodiment as a tool, and the body as a site for transformation. My recent works question the risks and possibilities of technological solutionism as a dominant Silicon Valley ideology and its implications on our emotional lives through video installations, sculptures, performances, and sound compositions. Examining current developments in AI through an allegorical lens, these works offer ‘outside view of ourselves’ as humans. The alternative narrative forms that I create with these intersecting mediums explore utopian aspirations while embracing the messiness of the present. I often direct, choreograph, compose, score and edit these works with other artists making collaboration an integral part of my process. As an organizer and founder of the Centre for Emotional Materiality, a collaborative research project, I ‘envision new kinds of affective relationships with technology that pave pathways for interdependent and pluralist futures.’