Jemma Desai is a writer, convener, facilitator and artist. Her practice — often working through, or close to the body — searches for forms that long to be held, received and connected with. (I am a daughter and a mother searching for arrangements that hold, nurture and strengthen bonds of love /At the heart of my practice is a wound which is also an attunement: to how power and permission meet in what is disclosed, made vulnerable, or protected)
She uses her body as material through which to theorise the felt and the disavowed dimensions of relational experience in divergent settings, creating performance writing, collaborative research projects and curatorial experiments. (In longing for the possibility of enfleshed concretisation I imagine potential infrastructures of care, presence, and reciprocity). Interested in the ambivalent attempts of voice and voicing in settings where one cannot be heard, she considers (and questions) the unsettling potentials of the vulnerable and enfleshed, of affect and affectability, of hesitancy and doubt. (I work with hesitation, doubt and absence as precursor to an always unfinished reparative desire).
Jemma has worked as film programmer, manager, board member, consultant, curator, convener and resident artist with institutions including the BFI, British Council, LUX, and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival and BlackStar Film Festival. She has presented her work internationally at places such as IDA, SAVVY Contemporary, OCA Norway and Forum Lenteng. She was Programmer-in-Residence at The Flaherty Seminar (2023–25) where she developed an unrealisable seminar entitled Yearning. Current collaborations include Somerset House Studios (artist) and BAM in Brooklyn (inaugural Experience Fellow), where she is working on a performance research project supported in part by an RSC Interdisciplinary Fellowship. (My practice is deliberately “everything-ist” and is always searching for dialogue and communion).
She teaches in academic and non-academic contexts and is a practice-based PhD candidate at Central School of Speech and Drama, developing a project on abolitionist praxis and poetics as form and infrastructure in cultural production.
London, UK
jemmadesai.com
jemmadesai at gmail dot com
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