Gayatri Kodikal
Gayatri Kodikal is an artist, writer, educator, and game maker known as gamedevi. She is currently the speculative fiction coach at MAMA, Rotterdam, and is an invited guest artist at the Posthuman & New Materialism Summer School at Utrecht University, Utrecht. She has previously worked as a freelance educator for TU Delft, Delft; Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru; and National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. She has a masters degree from the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem, and has previously studied filmmaking and psychology. Through the study of narratives Gayatri indulges in the specificities of the speculative, building multi-layered entangled histories, including the proto-feminist radical-sexual female body politics of a mysterious cult that presupposes the confluence of femininity, motherhood, and materiality. Moving image, sound, game design, and oral storytelling performances lead her to play with traces, decay, hauntings, and encounters within worldbuilding processes. For the Fellowship, Gayatri will investigate how the ‘mangrove game-world’ as metaphor becomes a site of resistance, repair, and reconciliation, while shapeshifting as a narrative trope lends itself to contemporary political strategies of embodiment and the undoing of the archive. Selected exhibitions include: The Travelling Hand, Tent, Rotterdam, 2020–2021; Have I Become Her Stories?, Tent, Rotterdam, 2020–2021; Twelve Cautionary Tales, Matadero Madrid, Madrid, 2020–2021; Art + Games World Tour, A Maze Festival for Arthouse Games and Playful Media, Berlin, 2020; and I am Sutradhar, The Gallery Guild, Mumbai, 2018. She lives and works in Rotterdam and Goa, and is part of the BAK cell, Utrecht, in the Fellowship for Situated Practice.