Bishi is a daughter of rangoli immigrants from Calcutta, his mother is a respected singer, and his father was a political activist and poet that won a Nobel prize. Her mother created the first classical music festival in India. The way Bishi uses the Sitar is controversial. Her roots were previously discussed in an article written by Louise gray on the platform Norient. Leigh Bowery inspired her, and she took part in numerous classical music DJ sessions with him. Bowery inspired the LGBT and Queer community and allowed her to encourage herself to explore her femininity. In her early career, she was into popular music and being a pop star. Call of the tiger, a performance directed by Mathew Hausen, is an audiovisual piece where Bishi wears a sensor suite that controls the entire audiovisual environment. Diati di Maria, a later work, guided to the production of Albion Voice LP, where she talks about the intersection of Indian and British ancestry. She used colonial imperialism as a leitmotif and primary visual aesthetic. She considers that the British presence in Calcutta is unerasable as so in her life. This project went worldwide: BFI, Brazil, Australia, being herself the executive producer and allowed herself to learn the world of spectacle and cinema industry. She managed to sell out in Queen Elizabeth’s Hall, and for her, dealing with all this success was complicated.
WITCiH, is a project where she explores polymath women and empowers them. She is the artistic director and co-founder of this hub for women in technology. She helped to develop the Creative Passport project founded by Imogen Heap and many other projects. WITCiH also allowed the spawn of the Creative Women in Tech podcast available on iTunes and Spotify.
Let My Country Awake is her upcoming album that explores her duality as British and rangoli identity, fusing also intersectionality and technology. It is her 3rd album to be released and is co-produced and mixed by herself and Jeff Cook. She firstly released a single under the same name, where she gets inspiration from Rabindranath Tagore’s poem.
During this quarantine, she collab with Volta to stream her single produced alongside Toni Visconti on Amazon Music. In this performance, she set a live improvisation with an electric sitar and voice in a VR/AR created by the company she reached out to. Improv was something that she got to practice a lot during the pandemic. Another project popped out of this thinking process, and in December 2020, she performed a live improv for Peabody Essex Museum to celebrate the opening of their South Asian Galleries. Her most recent work came out a few days ago, entitled Axis Mundi, on the 7th of May.
Bandcamp description:
“Axis Mundi is the Latin term for the axis of the earth between the celestial poles. This track was inspired by the science of trees’ communication with each other, the drawings of Carl Jung, and lockdown walks in Victorian cemeteries in London. It was composed through improvising with voice, Sitar, electronics and experimenting with Spitfire LABS.” This same song was part of an exhibit in the Museum of Design Atlanta called “The Future Happened,” where she got to collab again with Volta.