- Title:
- Offerings, Devika Bilimoria
- Author:
- Nithya Iyer
- Date:
- 12.12.25
Devika Bilimoria, Offerings, 2025, performance documentation, The London Open Live, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Fenia Kotsopoulou.
The lofty interiors of the gallery are still and near silent. A roving gallery audience is dotted along the edge of a rectangular demarcation lit within four stone pillars. A figure sits cross-legged atop the short end of the expanse, flanked on either side by piles of fruits and flowers, stacked tins of ghee and cartons of soy milk, weighty bags of rice and bottles of honey. Powders, implements and an assortment of vessels and utensils are amidst the supplies. With stoic focus, the figure reaches forward and rolls a pair of bronze dice.
KNEEL-SOUTH-BOW-HONEY-SPOON-BACKWARDS-NOISE.
STAND-EAST-PLACE-GHEE-HAND-LINGER-SING.
ON-BACK-NORTH-THROW-MONEY-POT-LINGER-MANTRA.
Offerings (2025) is a durational performance installation directed by the formation of randomised scores. Presented in four-hour segments across three days, several dozen unique scores are assembled in real-time and performed to a live audience. At first, the acts seem like near-absurd feats of frivolity, disrupting the space with an unfamiliar physicality that concludes in a visceral marking: an upturned brass vessel mounded in vermillion powder; an ascending stream of rice grain interrupting a glossy pool of honey; a coconut soaked in soy milk balancing a ceramic cup of melting ghee. As the hours pass, the stage is assaulted with an assemblage of colours, textures and trajectories, forging a liminal site somewhere between painting and set. Amidst this, the figure’s interventions grow complex and the uncanny merges with devotional to surface a strange osmotic language.
Devika Bilimoria, Offerings, 2025, performance documentation, The London Open Live, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Baiba Sprance and Marco-Beradi.
Conceived by Devika Bilimoria during their honours year at the Victorian College of the Arts, Naarm Melbourne, Offerings translates traditional experiences of pūjā—the devotional offering of flowers, food and sacred powders to idols in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist traditions—into interventions of repetition, endurance and improvisation. Mediating the tension between religious worship and contemporaneity through a deliberate randomness, Offerings reconfigures the notion of ritual into an experimental encounter where body and materials engage in unexpected and intense relations.
Offerings inaugurated the 2025 edition of the London Open Live festival under the programming of Leila Hasham, Hannah Woods and a panel of esteemed artists at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Established in 1932, the festival was created to platform artists of London’s East End and has since grown into an annual public showcase of diverse practitioners from across the city. This year, the festival theme responded to the considerable impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on live artists, with free daily performances across three consecutive months. Featuring 16 artists selected from an open call, the works traversed a range of concepts including endurance, duration, verbal and non-verbal language and the imagining of new worlds.
Devika Bilimoria, Offerings, 2025, performance documentation, The London Open Live, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Devika Bilimoria, Offerings, 2025, performance documentation, The London Open Live, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Amias Hanley.
Bilimoria’s own multifaceted background in fine art photography and videography, sculpture, installation and the Indian dance form Bharatanatyam, comprise the abstract playbook of Offerings. They shift fluidly between the roles of choreographer, producer and performer, making visible the logistics and toil of artistic labour whilst also surfacing a taut disciplinary border between conception and execution. In this way, the audience is invited into a vicarious participation. As we decipher the format and witness the evolution of its complexity, we come to recognise the precarity of Bilimoria’s task. Looking upon each other as another quixotic gesture commences, we find ourselves in a phenomenological communion: unreasonably vested in the fall of a grain of rice, astonished by the spherical spray of a melon dropped into a plateful of ‘kum kum’ vermillion powder, or transfixed as a body lies on the side of its torso faithfully singing INXS to a porcelain spoon of honey.
In South Asian religious traditions, the act of offering to the gods is a rite to be performed first and foremost by a priest. It is these holy men who instruct families on the divine duties bequeathed upon their caste or clan, petering sacred conventions down generations who disperse them across their migratory offspring and household conventions: the way a parent or grandparent anoints an idol, the assembly of an altar or the precision of a prostration. Yet, for many diasporic generations, these acts and our relevance within them, are never wholly demystified in relation to the central figure of the godhead.
It is this absence that Offerings speaks to, suggesting an alternate semiotics through which to engage in a dialogue with sanctity. Inhabiting the role of both priest and benefactor and displacing biases of caste, gender and familial rites, Bilimoria usurps orthodox hierarchies and reappropriates the templates of ritual. Carrying implements with their feet or petals in their mouth, singing pop songs or humming mantras casually, taboos of bodily sanitation and cultural purity are obliterated. In doing so, a counter proposition is presented, that both draws from and challenges the dictates of orthodoxy. Namely, that any offering may constitute a sacred act within a mode of experiential presence and in so doing, embed the body in an agentic communion to the existential other - or what one might call ‘the divine’.
Devika Bilimoria, Offerings, 2025, performance documentation, The London Open Live, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Amias Hanley.
Underscoring this contention, is the pair of hand-cast bronze dice that Bilimoria rolls at the outset of each score. In place of the all-knowing religious order from which rituals are drawn, is a tool of randomness, inviting a cryptic, playful and at times comical element. It brings to mind the bemusement of children whose early encounters of temple rituals often feel humorous, as though the acts were entirely made up. Yet the dice offer an appropriate metaphor for the quizzical nature of contemporary being and harbour an important symbolic association within Hindu religious texts. As noted by Indologist Wendy Doniger in The Hindus: An Alternate History (2009), dice are repeatedly referenced in Rig Veda poetry as a symbol of the corruption of man and his fall away from religious alignment and into moral and ethical uncertainty.1
I highlight this association to linger upon what I view as the central tension in Offerings. Amidst the contemporary nature of its performance are the spectres of originary religions which unsettle certain questions: Do these reimagined ritual offerings display a sense of reverence or disrespect? Mimicry or mocking? Alterity or corruption? Does a contemporary body re-signify these rituals through such composition, or does it disturb their spiritual order? Is the performance of such acts to a gallery audience a homage or a betrayal?
Devika Bilimoria, Offerings, 2025, performance documentation, The London Open Live, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Amias Hanley.
Devika Bilimoria, Offerings, 2025, performance documentation, The London Open Live, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Fenia Kotsopoulou.
In The Disappearance of Ritual (2020), South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han defines rituals as “symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world” which are capable of bringing forth a community without communication.2 Yet, he critiques the contemporary pursuit of producing ritual as a means of exploiting the communicative capacity of such acts and repurposing them as insular and atomised activities rather than relational structures of community.3 The scores of Offerings are technically being produced for the White Cube and as I watched the expressions of various onlookers I too realised that audiences with no experience of such traditions might find the work an enjoyable but ultimately frivolous spectacle of the ‘exotic’. But these subjectivities were also conjoined to the gazes of so many diasporic bodies engrossed in Bilimoria's interventions for wholly other reasons. Their hypothesised rituals, familiar and mutated, opened a shared terrain of grief and otherness occupied by us: the misshapen descendants of ‘imaginary homelands’ who are still attempting to carve out an ‘at-home’ within our alien existence.4
Born in Fiji of Gujarati-descent and raised in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, Bilimoria’s oeuvre has consistently interrogated the role of the body, corporeal memory and spectral haunting as a means of confronting and synthesising a porous and multidimensional subjectivity. In doing so, they draw from diffracted and obscured sources of memory, articulating them in a relentless queering of form and content. Bilimoria’s work is therefore inevitably bound to breach the thresholds of blasphemy, corruption and ritual purity whilst also straddling institutional penchants for culturally diverse subject-matters. For me, the more interesting question is what happens after such a breach; what is removed and what remains in the body of the viewer and the institution when a work both affirms and subverts the assumptions that might be imposed upon it.
Devika Bilimoria, Offerings, 2025, performance documentation, The London Open Live, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Amias Hanley.
Devika Bilimoria, Offerings, 2025, performance documentation, The London Open Live, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Devika Bilimoria.
As a former collaborator of Bilimoria, it is impossible for me to venture an unbiased critique of the positionality of this work. Rather, I provide the above provocations as a means to locate their practice within a small but growing body of South Asian artists that hold the ambition of reflecting a hybrid contemporaneity to reframe the cultural aesthetics of ‘migrant’- or ‘identity’-related practices and actualise what Gayatri Gopinath terms a ‘queer diasporic subjectivity.’ That is, a subjectivity that reflects “radically expansive visions of “home” and belonging, kinship and community that are not beholden to heteronormative and patrilineal logics.”5
Within the devised rituals of Offerings we are confronted with loving, curious and uncomfortable reflections about the phantom limb of cultural inheritance, but we are also liberated to dwell in the joy of the creative act. It is this dichotomy that comes to be mirrored within the brilliant and pulsing expanse of the frame—an anarchic territory that batters and smears its devotee with its labour and residue of whilst we watch on, anxious and yearning that it spill from its enclosure and embrace us in refuge.
Offerings was performed daily on 5, 6 and 7 June 2025 as part of The London Open Live at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
Whitechapel Gallery’s historic London Open program (running since 1932) took place in 2025 from June through September and focused on Live Practice. Building on this gallery’s long history of commissioning and staging performance, The London Open Live mapped different types of live art practices in London at this time, across generations and broad definitions of liveness.
This piece is one of two reviews Performance Review is publishing in response to this program.
Wendy Doniger, “Other Others: Marginalizing Intoxication and Addiction,” in The Hindus, (Viking Penguin, 2009). Note: it is also the game of dice that gods deploy to determine the four ‘Yugas’ or ‘Ages’ in Hinduism, and dice are interwoven in many religious stories of where and how divine order and ritual were dealt justice when used by gods and folly when used by men.
Byung-Chul Han translated by Daniel Steuer, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2020) 2.
Ibid.
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (Granta Books in association with Penguin: New York, 1992).
Gayatri Gopinath, Verena Lindemann Lino and Vera Herold, “Interview with Gayatri Gopinath: Queer Diasporas and Archival Production,” DIFFRACTIONS Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture No.4, Second Series, The Lisbon Consortium, October 2021: 159.
Nithya Iyer is an interdisciplinary researcher and writer who currently resides in Lisbon, Portugal. Working predominantly across writing and performance, she seeks to investigate how the body and the body in motion, relates to ideas of diasporic inheritance and territory. Nithya’s work has been featured in the European Cooperation Programme’s 4Cs Project and she is the co-founder of the Daotown House of Alternative Research and Culture with Dr. Zohar Iancu and the architecture and performance collaboration, The Third Thing, with Vlad Mizikov.
Performance Review acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we operate. We pay our respects to their Elders; past, present and emerging and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.