Artist / Researcher

Through practice I enjoy learning and exchanging ideas. I believe there are no authoritative figures on knowledge and so through participation and engagement, I facilitate discourse around race, gender, disability, social class and the intersections . It’s not always an easy conversation, conflict is necessary, dialogue can create conflict. For me, facilitation and collaboration are about equity not equality, about allowing others to take up space, rather than taking up space myself (sometimes its necessary though). My practice asks: How can conviviality work to create reciprocal relationships with other art workers? How do we avoid or repair the bad relationships? How do we know the difference? How can we advocate for rest, slowness and saying no, whilst working to create space for ourselves and others?

I have worked with BMAG, New Art Gallery Walsall, Niru Ratnam, The Bluecoat, Tate Liverpool, GLOAM, Primary and internationally in Spain and Canada. I have work in permanent collections including Arts Council Collection. I won the Tate Liverpool award for my socially engaged work in 2020 and Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2024. I’m interested in DIY culture, care and ethics both in and outside of institutions. I currently run a grassroots publishing press, Jalebi Press with a publication due to be launched August 2024. I hope the press can foster a multi-vocal approach platforming other creatives of global majority backgrounds who wouldn’t normally be given any support from institutions. If we aren’t recognised by institutions, we must recognise each other. In 2018 I co-founded a collective of South Asian artists - the collective SAAC, is currently a support hub for many artists and hopes to gain more momentum through paid work and commissions for the members.
 


Some thoughts

I’m never sure what box to tick on an equal opportunities form. Am I British Asian, Indian, where’s the box for Punjabi? I feel like I could be in between these boxes, I am beyond these boxes. I explore this notion within my inner practice, (work I make spiritually) and my outer practice (work I make collaboratively). That’s not to say that the two are mutually exclusive practices. I cannot separate one from the other in that they inform one another, one cannot be without the other, they collaborate, collectivise and sometimes cohabitate spaces.

I explore the relationships and connections we have with each other, because I feel this is where our formulation of self comes from. My identity is shaped around my communities. I’m interested in multiplicity in culture and how that is conducive to ideas of belonging and home. I work across mediums and practices, the main threads being community, hospitality and service. These are Sikh values, Panjabi values and societal morals too. The English translations do no justice. How can Sangat and Seva ever be quantified in the language of the coloniser? Equally, I’m aware of the inter-politics of my own culture, the orthodoxies of powers, of caste politics and prejudices. There are no solutions, only complexity, entanglements and conflict. In between it all is a space of ‘sistahood’, trans*cultural kinship and community in the most queerest of senses.