Thread-based Animations 2021–current

Looking for Absolutes in a Relative World, 2025
(Shown in Co-incidence of Time and Being, Vadehra Art gallery, New Delhi)

Looking for Absolutes in A Relative World(2025, video, 43 mins) is a video which documents the artist inscribing ephemeral sentences with ink on the surface of water. Each phrase articulates a yearning for stability, meaning and permanence even as the inked words ripple, distort and dissolve. As they lose their coherence, the bleeding words surrender their capacity to contain meaning, echoing the poignant (and ultimately unattainable) pursuit of constancy in a medium (water) that inherently resists it.

On Time As Rhythmic Interference, 2024
(Shown in Co-incidence of Time and Being, Vadehra Art gallery, New Delhi)

On Time as Rhythmic Interference looks at our relationship to nature and to the rhythms of time we carry within us -primordial, elemental, slow, frantic, structured, eternally determined, measured and relative. The installation consists of a still, skeletal plant form located in the center of time’s swirling shadows.

One by one, shadows emerge from the base of the black fern, lengthening and rotating to mark different rhythms of time. The first movement of shadow is a slow, seamless succession of moments that form a smoothly skewing path, spiraling into and growing out of the center -reminiscent of shadows created by the sun on a sun-dial.

This slow, sweeping, elemental rhythm is then joined by a second movement in time, reminiscent of a ticking clock hand – an unvarying shadow that leaps from moment to measured moment, as it systematically marks every degree in the circle of light around the black fern. As time progresses, more shadows appear and the marking of time gets more structured, staccato, and mechanical. Each shadow moves faster than the one before, overlapping and overtaking each other, moving in and out of sync with each other’s rhythms, creating momentary patterns of both – harmony and dissonant asymmetry. As the pace increases, the shadows start to spiral frantically like the blades of a fan building up to a frenzied pitch, which finally causes these shadow rhythms to blur and melt into each other, leaving behind the original rhythm of the first movement.

Drawing (A Boat) on Water and Endings are Beginnings are Endings, 2024
(Shown in Khoj International Residency, Khoj Studios, New Delhi)

This series of animations and videos explore themes of temporality, fragility, collapse and regeneration in our shape-shifting constructs of home and the world.

A hand appears with an inked brush over the surface of water and attempts to draw the image of a boat. As the boat mutates and dissolves, the attempt is repeated over and over again. The insistence of the action in imprinting a form upon a field that refuses to hold it, finally results in a swirling, black cloud of dispersed ink.

A soluble-paper and thread model of a home, hovers above the surface of slowly rising waters, awaiting its inevitable dissolution into flailing strings reminiscent of roots searching for a stable hold.

A set of video triptychs feature the rising and falling of drawn and embroidered world-maps as documented by selected cartographers (list below) across the centuries. Appearing on translucent, soluble veils, the maps begin to mutate, dissolve and resolve themselves into new forms, new understandings of the world. One set of movements play with reflection, duality, lines of force, mandala-like patterns of energy and a flower-like unfurling of world images. Another set of movements play with effort and labour in the constructed world-image, that appears stitch by embroidered stitch. As one image of the world collapses another rises. Occasionally there is a total entropic breakdown of the old world-image, and a return to a smouldering, raw, unordered state of its original material (thread and ink).

Spurred by desire to find our place in the world, to have agency in navigating a potentially threatening environment, to control, acquire, conquer, grasp more of the world or simply – to understand and map “home”, we have created many images of the world. Currently on the cusp of a shifting world rhythm, (highlighted by climate change and polarising politics), many questions erupt. Will we re-imagine our stories or configure them back into the same pattern again? Will there be a shapeshifting of our ideologies, our relationship to time, to nature and to the environment? Will the old images linger on?

As Structure Dissolves, 2021
(Shown in Given Time: The Gift and its Offerings, Aicon gallery, New York)

This feels like such an unusual and incredible moment in human history. We are still on the unstable cusp of a shifting world-rhythm. Our old structures -social, political, patriarchal, environmental, medical, and economic- seem to be unravelling and this gift of time we have suddenly been given, offers a shapeshifting of our stories, identities, and ideologies.

As I contemplate the idea of the ‘gift’, ‘given time’, ‘unraveling structures and stories’ in my personal life, our family home –33 Link Road -in Delhi comes to mind. This home was built, post the partition of India, by my refugee grandparents and has been the site of innumerable family gatherings, shared stories, weddings, new births, and shared grief in deaths. The idea of ‘home ‘ has continually been tethered to this “permanent” address, which offered the gift of stability, as I shifted cities, countries and houses – but always returning, to the familiar surfaces of this home, with its whispered promise of constancy. For the first time in 70 years this home now lies empty, its last occupant (my grandmother) recently deceased.

The thread drawings and animation are of the architectural fragments from 33 Link Road, converting its solid, protective, sheltering surfaces into soft, spectral cob-webs of past memories; flattened as if preserved within the pages of a book . The familiar becomes itinerant, wandering, shape shifting as the hard architecture starts unravelling, hovering weightlessly, like an insubstantial mirage. In the stop-motion animation, a beloved door from 33 Link Road is constructed stitch by embroidered stitch. Ultimately the form mutates, fragments and dissolves back into its original material (thread), swirling like a galactic phenomenon, offering back into the universe its temporal gift of form, to be assimilated into the material of stars. As the thread resists the change in form, tugging at its identity as a door, I start to consider that- this pull and push, this fracturing of, reassembling or leaving open our stories and who we thought we were, stretch the spectrum of identity, exposing unconsidered possibilities for who we can be.