bio

The crisscrossing threads of my identity as a Bengali Indian and a conditional resident of the USA unfurl and entangle conventional forms of artistic knowledge. Through my paintings and installations, I assemble fragments of my life, past and present, to describe the breadth of my multicultural experiences and the worlds in which I live. My practice explores a wide variety of visual vernaculars informed by my lived experiences, including cartography, the geometry of urban design, semiotics, and more. My work is further influenced politically and formally by my professional experiences as a graffiti artist, sign painter, web designer, and muralist.

I live with a keen awareness of the origins and implications of materials so often taken for granted, such as plywood, food packets, aluminum cans, and hardware. I grew up in the suburbs of Calcutta and spent every summer in the rural village of my mother’s birth and father’s desher bari, surrounded by crop fields; during our journey, we would pass through the industrial areas supplied by those fields, wherein jute plants were turned into rope and burlap, mustard seeds into mustard oil, and more. As a practicing artist, my earliest memories are of participating in building pandals, which are impressive, yet temporary, architectural structures constructed in the open air by members of the local community that showcase indigenous craft and house religious altars. In making these, the artists apply paint using a technique called angaraag, a process of repainting temple household deities for the sake of pujo, whereby divine power is reestablished and worshiped.

In my own current practice, I pull from my varied and rich experiences with different kinds of making to integrate visual vernaculars using a range of processes and materials. In some pieces, I apply and sand ten to fifteen coats of watered down gesso, calling upon angaraag processes; by creating a non-absorbent glassy surface that resists paint, I further invoke histories of sign painting, from auto body repair shops to bus windows in the Indian subcontinent. In others, I use my documentation of sidewalks as a framework for assemblage, upon which I overlay autobiographical annotations and painted remarks that implicate myself as well as the systems within which I live.

My practice ultimately aims to bring to the surface how multiculturalism is an illusory capitalistic concept that represents sovereignty rather than collective liberation and to expose the gaps I see in Western postcolonial theory. I’m interested in thinking about how the contemporary industrial complex bears and bares histories of colonial factories, and how my practice is suspended between and links ideas of postcolonial, globalized heterotopias. I see the world as a fragmented ensemble, and that fragmentation is excruciating. I seek to establish continuity through my research, paintings, and installations.