About

As a performance artist, Moodzi (Abhijeet Mudgerikar) narrates stories on the intersections of architecture, gender experimentation, social activism, community engagement, and freestyling over music.

Growing up in Ahmedabad was challenging. Brought up in a Marathi middle-class family, their beliefs were very conservative and made rigid in a disciplined household. With the city’s violent past and a majoritarian cultural hegemony, they lived in fear of their choices and identity. However, dance became a positive outlet for channeling repressed parts and emotions. Acceptance towards their sexual orientation and gender identity, was driven by dancing with others. Paranoid Dance Crew gave them access to perform unconventional dance styles in South Asia, such as Waacking, Vogue Femme, and House. This led to conceiving a community center in Ahmedabad that helped them learn and teach such dance forms. Working on this venture, they trained other young artists from similarly marginalised backgrounds in various skills required to run an organisation. Their practice expanded to performing and facilitating events in public spaces where self-expression was celebrated and nurtured. Such setups helped individuals from underrepresented communities develop a sense of belonging and confidence in claiming spaces.

For their undergraduate degree in architecture, they wrote a thesis on the causal link between movement and performance spaces of Indian classical dance forms. In a project titled Invisible Dance, funded by Goethe-Institut, they conceptualised Social Dance Experiments – informal gatherings initiated with music and dance to perceive segregations within communities. Doing this at four contrasting locations in Ahmedabad challenged participants’ notions about each other’s identities, connecting them across barriers of caste, class and gender.

AREAS OF INTEREST:

At present, Moodzi is studying the historical, cultural, and etymological references of “nazar” in India, to form its connections with contemporary narratives of societal perceptions affecting queer marginalized people. Their recent performances portray the desires of a queer South Asian person affected by a constant gaze. Other than their pedagogy of merging architecture and visual art with movement practices, their research on "nazar" has expanded to conduct workshops on the relationship between borders and belonging, specific to cartographic anxiety.