Art in the Bar: Nisha Ramayya

Art in the Bar

29.03.24 - 01.09.24

Nisha Ramayya invites people to take a listening walk; a journey through real and imagined landscapes that’s conducted through sound. We all have different experiences of hearing and not hearing; our bodies respond to sound, music and noise in different ways. What happens when we gather to listen, conjure voices and choruses, and create our own social rhythms?

The poet offers an invitation and an opportunity to speculate about what we might discover if we use our sensory organs alongside our extra-sensory perceptions to tune into other frequencies. We might encounter other beings, other forms of knowledge, other worlds. Nisha is interested in what this speculative listening practice could teach us about social life, about navigating harmony and dissonance. Poetry, for her is a way of reaching out, to try and resonate with others, however brief the connection.

About Nisha Ramayya

Nisha works across poetry, criticism and collaborative performance, and teaches creative writing. She’s the author of States of the Body Produced by Love (Ignota, 2019). The poems here are from her new collection, Fantasia, which is published by Granta in August this year. Fantasia hazards a listening walk, through seashells, telecommunication networks and cosmic vibrations, to learn something new about how we sound. These poems that hum and glitch, that leap across space-time, landing in and reflecting the discordant music of life on earth, are guided by Alice Coltrane’s experiments in jazz and spiritual community.