Multiple Choice 

  a collaboration in motion
  research, intervention


heeten bhagat 
& nisha merit




India - Germany 

                    2025 (ongoing)
Janna Levin US American theoretical cosmologist and professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College
Notes from David Wright Falade Reads Madeleine Thien - Lu, Reshaping. The New Yorker: Fiction podcast.
Nadia Asparouhova:  “User named qntm logged one of these paranormal entities that he called an anti meme, an entity you can engage with in the moment, you can talk to it, you can remember all the details about it and then you step away and suddenly you can’t seem to retain any information about  having interacted with it. (…) And qntm eventually built that out into a bigger idea and published this  book called “There Is No Antimemetics  Division, 2021.”

Multiple Choice is an ongoing intervention between Dr. Heeten Bhagat and Nisha Merit, rooted in a shared quest for play, getting lost, and rearranging elements to create together. We began working together at A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town, where the intersection of curatorial production and academia shaped our mutual interest in the interstitial and the playful.

Multiple Choice emerged from that experience - as an intervention anchored in the realm of continuously and consciously teetering on the precipice, where the outcome is neither positive nor negative. It is not about arriving at a conclusion, but about its situatedness.

From a shared spatial collaboration to a dispersed inquiry between India and Germany, this is an ongoing gathering of moments, fragments, and diversions - questions, wonderings, and speculation.

Situatedness - a lexicon of the body builds the frame of the remote conversations and exchanges between us. It examines its application in real time, as well as in delayed recall through the digital.

To be socialised, to be in relation, and to be, is considered a rational act—defining language, cultural cues, and the reading of an environment. It determines discernment. Situatedness, however, considers the physical language of being in relation. It attends to the subtle nuances of being and records a lexicon of the body.

We are exploring phenomena of closeness alongside dispersed conditions - being in situ versus being everywhere online. The quality of small, intimate groups; the slow unfolding of ideas; and the intentional sharing of information stand in contrast to virality, surface, and mass.

Situatedness is an inquiry into what it means to be connected in real time without being physically present. What do community and engagement mean today?

Can we form communication strategies that allow for deep engagement, even from a distance? The permanent need to share, archive, and publish stands in contrast to the fleeting moment, the process of development, and the conscious act of sharing.
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Dr. heeten bhagat works in the emerging terrain of pracademics - essentially looking to expand collaborations and design experiments between academia and real-life systems. He approaches this work as a methodologist - bringing pragmatic and provocative programming to support decolonial & diversity - expanding processes in overlooked and underserved environments.

Nisha Merit is the founder of Merit Art Collective, she works in the intersection of the curatorial, academic research and text.


@nishamerit — all rights reserved.