Tumbatāra (2026 - ongoing)
Category: Instrument, sound installation, residency
Presented at: after movement, after matter (Jan 28 - Feb 13) 2026
Location: Braunschwieg, Deutschland
Venue/Gallery: Montagehalle, HBK Braunschweig
Artistic collaborator, technical design: Vladimir Razhev
Photo and video documentation: Patrick Neugebauer
The project takes place within the framework of Braunschweig Projects Fellowship program (April 2025-March 2026)
Supported by: Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur
Curated by: Bhavisha Panchia
Link: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/6785605/braunschweig-projects-2025-2026-after-movement-after-matter
A central reference for Tumbatāra, is the tumba, a dried gourd used as a resonating body in many traditional string instruments from South Asia, such as the tanpura, ektara, and rudra veena. Their hollow form and acoustic logic support sustained sound and overtonal colour, and is a reminder of material and immaterial knowledge, including labour, listening, and inherited wisdom transposed across lineages of instrument-making craft and imagination.
Tumbatāra is an installation that explores the metaphysics of materials through instrument design and hand-based processes, foregrounding transformative processes through which sound, resonance, and form emerge. Each of the eight ceramic tumbas is slip-cast from a pumpkin’s body, translating the gourd’s natural architecture, volume, and curvature into clay. They are made audible by strings stretched through a membrane at its base, set into continuous vibration by electromagnetic coils. The work explores how principles of resonance and continuity can be reinterpreted through new materials and electroacoustic practice.
The tuning process remains open to how vibration circulates, lingers, and carries into its physical arrangement. Here, resonance is passed between the ceramic tumbas and can be routed to influence one another. This shared weaving and sculptural augmentation forms the basis of Tumbatāra’s sonic language, inspired by long traditions of drone music – sustained tones, slow transformations, and delicate shifts in overtone colour.
Details and installation views
Instrument / Installation
stoneware ceramic gourds, wood, metal, electromagnetic coils, custom-made sound generators, 3D printed elements
Process