Dozen Nights with Sashanti: 2 May 2014

The Basement presents
Dozen Nights – Episode 2

featuring
SASHANTI [RUSSIA] – SOMA PROJECT

also featuring
THE SHADOW
a live media performance by Francesca Fini
with Francesca Fini and Arka Mukhopadhyay

opening by:
SoSleazy [DJ set]

on
FRIDAY 2 MAY 2014

The Basement (Hotel Samilton) presents a night of electronic music with Russian DJ Alexander Sukhochev (aka Sashanti) performing in Kolkata for the first time with support from Sleazy.

Sashanti (Alexander Sukhochev)

Alexander Sukhochev (aka Sashanti) is a creatively gifted person who fulfilled himself in many art forms including journalism, photography, writing, promotion and DJing. During the twenty years of the artistic career he became a prizewinning journalist, showed few of his photo exhibitions around the world and released a best-selling book in Russia about Goa named “The Goa Syndrome”. Music though is given a very particular role among all, being a fuel for all the achievements. Sashanti’s music collection started to take shape with a rare electronic music in a still existing Soviet Union, which he played later on in the nightclubs of his small provincial hometown. Being a pioneer of the electronic movement in his native city, he felt the need to grow further. Next step was moving to the cultural centres of Russia Moscow and then St. Petersburg, where he continued to work and develop in the nightlife business.
In the year of 2004 Alexander is shifting the residency to Goa, which triggered a new turn in his career as a disk jockey and promoter. In parallel with dominating local Trance music scene he brought fresh waves by playing Techno and House genres. It appeared to be a brand new phenomenon and attracted lots of interest from smart crowd. The music revolution in Goa is party credited to Sashanti since such venues as Shanti Goa and Soma Project appeared on the Aswem scene. Both places became popular seasonal hub for a quality good-timer community and hosted quite a big number of events featuring Mathew Johnson, Koze, Cheb-I-Sabbah, D’Julz, Bjorn Wilke, Djuma Soundsystem, dOP, SCSI-9, Klartraum, Mathias Schaffhaeuser, Cesare vs. Disorder, Shades of Gray, Bauchklang etc.

His influence and support of underground electronic music has expanded to Bangalore scene in 2013, where Alexander kickstarted as a creative director an exclusive entertainment program for private membership club Sanctum. The venue hosted all significant Indian artists as Murthovic+Flish with live act, B.L.O.T with their new 3D visual show, Ankytrixx, Kini Rao, Inferno etc. Along with the dance events the first ever Bangalore music conference SMC and Kaato Music label night was introduced to the young producers and EDM industry professionals in association with Beatworx Studio, The Inventory India, Juicebox Records and Bjorn Wilke with his Kaato imprint from Germany.
Sashanti himself plays both dance and lounge music, which he carefully selects from Tech-house, Techno, Oriental Fusion and Chill-out sounds. Putting together atmospheric melodies and groovy tracks in his own matchless manner he captures light moods and employs subtle energies on the dance-floors. For the last years Sashanti played sets on all the main stages of big festivals in India and around: Big Chill (Goa, India, 2006), Sunburn (Goa, India, 2010-2013), Sula Fest (Nashik, India, 2010-2013), Universal Religion (Pokhara, Nepal, 2012). Besides, he is regularly invited to top Indian nightclubs, fashion shows and private parties. Every summer Alexander is touring in Europe and Russia, playing sets at such clubs as Palais in Munich, Climax Institutes in Stuttgart, Supperclub and Club NL in Amsterdam, Katerholzig in Berlin, Chapeau Rouge in Prague as well as many other clubs in Russia and ex-soviet territory. Sashanti released five CDs of his own compilation in Shanti Moscow, recorded two podcasts for Kaato Music and at the present moment working on his own production.

THE SHADOW
with Francesca Fini and Arka Mukhopadhyay

THE SHADOW
a live media performance by Francesca Fini

“To be, or not to be” The question is made by remixing the words of Sir Laurence Olivier in his Hamlet.

The question is always the same, eternal, but here gains new meaning. Being or not being, here, means to decide to exist in the real world or in the virtual.

In the performance the most vulgar tools at the base of interaction design and digital entertainment are incorporated within a traditional aesthetic vision that gives them absolutely new and unifying meaning. The performance was designed to use a simple webcam connected to a real-time software that tracks Francesca’s movements in space and associates them with sounds, turning her body into a sort of interactive synthesizer. At the same time the artist’s face, projected live on screen behind her, is deconstructed and blended with 3D graphics in order to obtain a kind of augmented reality game. The concept behind the performance is the desire of melting together two very distant languages: Shakespeare and a video game. So that the solipsism of the playstation becomes Hamlet’s own struggle, while the aesthetics of ritual theater decomposes in the psychedelia of a videogame.

Francesca Fini is an Interdisciplinary artist dealing with new media and performance art. Her projects always face issues with a strong social and political component “staging a body amplified by technology while retaining its animal nature ” (from “Francesca Fini, the disturbing image” by Alessio Galbiati for Rapporto Confidenziale/Digicult magazine). In her performances and videos she often works with lo-fi technologies, homemade interaction design devices, live generated audio and video, hacking and manipulating everyday objects such as surveillance cameras, Nintendo Wiimote, cheap webcams, domestic sensors and therapeutic electrodes. All of these tools are used to explore reality in its most disturbing aspects, revealing the ironic twist of any apparently tragic issue. Among the important events she took part in the last few years we cite the Wroclaw WRO Biennale 2011, where she was scheduled in the performance art section with artists such as Stelarc and Istvan Kantor, the ADD Festival to Macro Museum in Rome, the finals of Arte Laguna Prize in Venice and Celeste Prize in New York, the Montpellier Film Festival, the Directors Lounge in Berlin, the Ikono TV Film Festival, the FILE Electronic Language International Festival and FAD Festival in Brazil, the CologneOFF and the Magmart Video Art Festival (which she won in 2010, 2012 and 2013). In 2012 she was invited to participate in the first “Venice International Performance Art Week”, curated by VestAndPage, which hosted among others the work of Valie Export, Jan Fabre, Yoko Ono, Boris Nieslony and Hermann Nitsch. In 2013 she won the “Fonlad Performance Art Residency ” to prepare a new performance in Coimbra, with the support of the Italian Institute of Culture in Lisbon, and was invited to Chicago to Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival. In the same year she was invited to perform in Santander, Spain, for the Gallery Weekend and in London for Modern Panic IV exhibition, along with names like Jodorowsky and Erik Ravelo. She is now a finalist for the prestigious Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition 2014, the international award for the electronic arts related to music, sponsored by the Georgia Institute of Technology. She exhibits her work in galleries and museums around the world.