Gayatri Kodikal

Gayatri Kodikal is an artist, writer, educator, and game maker known as gamedevi. She has an anti-disciplinary practice creating game worlds - both analogue and digital, experimental film, installations and performance. Engaging with the personal and political, her research explores haunting, encounter and disappearance as a speculative strategy for the modulating body in response to social and technological power structures. Psycho-geography, cinema, game design and oral storytelling informs her research and inquiry that has led the work often combining specific historical instances with her interests in ghost stories, animism and spatial memories. The investigative quality of such instances, missing information and wrong trails inspire fictional reconstructions and speculative situations that appear in most of the works. She traces the material and immaterial as assemblage, where she tries to maintain the illusive physicality of the digital and instability of the analogue.

Selected exhibitions include: The Travelling Hand, Tent, Rotterdam, 2020–2021; Have I Become Her Stories?, Tent, Rotterdam, 2020–2021; Twelve Cautionary Tales, Matadero Madrid, Madrid, 2020–2021; Art + Games World Tour, A Maze Festival for Arthouse Games and Playful Media, Berlin, 2020; and I am Sutradhar, The Gallery Guild, Mumbai, 2018. She lives and works in Rotterdam and Goa, and was part of the BAK cell, Utrecht, in the Fellowship for Situated Practice in 2021/2022. Gayatri is a Speculative Fiction Coach at MAMA Rotterdam (since 2020).  

Learn more about Gayatri Kodikal's 20 minute presentation The Travelling Hand: Palimpsests under moonlit mangroves for the AEROPONIC ACTS 2020 - DAI's 3 day lectures marathon at Radio Kootwijk, August 2020. 

Learn more about Gayatri Kodikal's written MA thesis (DAI, 2020): Shapeshift: Worlding and Political Strategies of Embodiment

Follow Gayatri's "Life after DAI" throught her website and instagram