Harkeerat Mangat – Good Neighbours

For his guest lecture, Harkeerat Mangat will string together two strands in his recent research: performance in Indian classical music and techniques for ethnographic filmmaking. Over a span of three years, Mangat worked together with residents of a park square in Düsseldorf, Germany to create a structural film about their neighbourhood. One year later, Mangat cast a different group of residents from the same neighbourhood to critique the film. The lecture traces his project’s trajectory, shedding light on the dynamics at play when he amplified the role his environment had in shaping the outcome of his work.

Harkeerat Mangat is an artist and Indian classical musician. Since 2009 he has received training in Dagarvani Dhrupad from Uday Bhawalkar. Mangat is a Meisterschuler from Prof. Christopher Williams’ photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. His works have been exhibited at the Stiftung Museum Insel Hombroich, Neuss; K21 Kunstssammlung NRW, Düsseldorf; Simultanhalle, Cologne; and Aga Khan Museum, Toronto. He has received several prizes for his work including the Stipendium Vordemberge Gildewart (2021), Peter-Mertes Stipendium (2021), and Kulturstiftung-Rheinland Föderpreis (2020). He is currently working on a dissertation in Cognitive Science at the University of Vienna, Austria.