Artist Statement
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I grew up in a household where silence often carried more weight than words, where rupture, domestic violence, and survival were part of daily life. These early experiences shaped my understanding of presence and resistance, teaching me that survival is not only physical but also psychic, spiritual, and deeply embodied. From this ground, my practice emerges as a search for forms, gestures, and materials that can hold the contradictions of identity and memory without reducing them to a single narrative.
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Working across painting, textiles, pyrography, installation, and performance, my practice emphasizes slowness, layering, and ritual as methods of resistance. I gravitate toward gestures that refuse easy consumption: burning, stitching, tearing, layering, and rewriting. These actions leave behind surfaces that are scarred, unstable, and contradictory traces of refusal and persistence. I am drawn to fragile, process-based materials such as tangled thread or oil paint because they carry both memory and vulnerability.
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Migration intensified these concerns. Leaving India for Europe was not so much a choice as a necessity. I became acutely aware of how bureaucratic, cultural, and institutional systems demand that identity be legible, simplified, and “digestible.” As a migrant, I was asked to constantly perform legibility: to fit into categories of nationality, gender, or cultural origin that rarely reflected my lived experience. I describe this condition through the metaphor of “acid reflux’’ what cannot be assimilated returns, sometimes painfully. This metaphor is central to my methodology. My works regurgitate what systems attempt to flatten: bureaucratic language, colonial stereotypes, digital clichés, and institutional expectations.
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In recent projects, I integrate ritual and absurdity as strategies to resist legibility. I perform slow gestures of tearing, swallowing, or cooking to reframe experiences of displacement as acts of transformation. My paintings are not windows but thresholds: slow surfaces where sedimentation, rupture, and repetition come together as sites of contemplation.
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Underlying all of this is a deep spiritual sensibility, inherited from my grandmother and the atmospheric rituals of my upbringing. Silence, mysticism, and intuition remain integral to my practice not as decorative motifs, but as living methodologies. By engaging with contradictions fragility and resilience, absurdity and gravity, presence and erasure I aim to create spaces that resist closure.
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Ultimately, my works are not meant to be easily decoded. They invite viewers to linger with discomfort, uncertainty, and contradiction to stay with what is unresolved. In a context dominated by clarity and speed, I insist on opacity, slowness, and vulnerability.
Through this practice, I position art not as a resolution, but as a residue sensory and spiritual space where fractured identities, suppressed memories, and unseen forms of resilience continue to breathe. My work asks: What if our histories refuse to be digested by systems that demand clarity? What are we forced to swallow in silence?