Presentation12 August 2026, 11:05am to 11:20am
Dialogue 12 August 2026, 02:55pm to 04:15pm
In this presentation I reflect on my body of work that treats perception both as a material and a method. Since 2019, I have created and produced multisensory and participatory experiences for audiences such as Spoonfed, Shahi Tukra, First-Hand, In All Its Glory, and Together with the Other. Encompassing these works is a framework: Mediated Sensory Fictions that invites audiences to inhabit altered sensory and emotional positions through touch, taste, smell, instruction, and narrative imagination. Through this framework, that is situated within postcolonial and ecological concerns, I generate conditions in which sensing becomes active, relational, and embodied. These multisensory experiences create space to explore perception as plural and unstable, shaped by attention, memory, and interoceptive awareness. In the context of increasing digital fatigue and overstimulation, Mediated Sensory Fiction becomes a tool for slowing down perception and re-attuning to material presence. The talk draws on documentation, sound, and narrative reflection to offer insight into processes that are otherwise intimate, ephemeral, and not directly demonstrable. It also reflects on the ethics of care and the value of labour embedded in these works, where sustained acts of attention, facilitation, and caregiving can be both generative and exhausting for the performer. By engaging neurodivergent and varied perceptual realities, the works expands how we understand inclusion, proposing sensing itself as a shared yet differentiated ground for connection, understanding, and world-making.
Nitish Jain is a queer South Asian artist based in Prague, working between India and Europe. His multi-sensory practice explores non-visual aesthetics through phenomenology and rasa aesthetics, addressing postcoloniality and rest as ecological attunement and mental wellbeing. He creates participatory works that counter digital fatigue and reimagine perception, inviting audiences to sense rather than see through touch, taste, smell, and listening. He trained as an architect (SSAA, India, 2012) and scenographer (DAMU, Czechia, 2018). His works have been presented across Czechia, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, UK, UAE, Italy, and India.