Description

we move; therefore, we are is a meditation on migration as both necessity and inheritance. The series explores how movement—forced or chosen, generational or momentary—shapes identity, memory, and belonging. Through layered materials and symbolic gestures, I examine what it means to carry home on one’s back, to find continuity in rupture, and to locate the self in transit.

As an artist of the South Asian-Indian diaspora with multiple cultural identities—a dual citizen, immigrant, mother, and, above all, a human being—I observe and reflect on the human condition through all these lenses. My work is grounded in telling stories often unheard or erased. I pose questions that ask us to stay with discomfort, to confront truths that are often hidden beneath systems of power, silence, and survival.

we move; therefore, we are grows from the understanding that movement is not just physical—it is emotional, cultural, and political. Whether through displacement, diaspora, or survival, we are always in motion: shifting languages, roles, and rituals to adapt, to resist, to live. Each piece in the series becomes a site of accumulation and erasure. Textiles, imprints, and fragments emerge and disappear, mirroring the instability of place and the fragility of memory. The act of making becomes an act of remembering and reclaiming—rendering visible what dominant systems seek to suppress.

I draw deeply from my lived experience as an immigrant and a mother, as well as from the broader histories of colonization, labor, and resilience. As a feminist and artivist, I stand in opposition to Hindu fundamentalism, white supremacy, nationalism, and patriarchy—and to the destruction of our only home, Mother Earth. I use material labor as resistance: drilling, burning, sculpting, wrapping. Found objects, traditional textiles, and cast forms come together in works that blur boundaries between Eastern and Western aesthetics.

Guided by the Bhagavad Gita’s principle of focusing on the labor rather than the reward, I approach art as both inquiry and offering. I believe in the power of art to expand perspectives, challenge injustice, and inspire change. we move; therefore, we are insists that movement is not the loss of roots, but the replanting of them. It honors the wisdom in wandering, the strength in leaving, and the beauty in building again.