Artist Statement

I am a Swiss artist of Indian origin, based in Geneva since 1980.

The main themes that drive my multi-disciplinary practice are queer ecology, colonialism and the ideas of collective memory and ‘Home’. I view the intersection of these preoccupations through the lens of various natural sciences. My interest in the discipline of botany has led me to question the motives that lie beyond the academic study of plants, from its roots in establishing and perpetuating colonial power to its present role in modern extractivist practices. My concerns with the study of plants, soils and water, along with the proposition of a non-human witness encourage me to further deconstruct traditional lines of inquiry and question the hierarchical dissemination of knowledge within the rigid didactics of natural history institutions which define what we refer to as nature.

These concepts pertaining to scientific discourse, were further consolidated in my practice after my residency at the CJBG (Conservatoire et Jardin Botaniques de Genève). My interests lie in the blurring of borders that plants organically create within the formal constructs of parks, gardens and botanical institutions. The migration of plants allows for the poetics of the ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ and the ‘ungovernable’ to co-habit, until human intervention happens. These processes have led me to thinking about the similarities in the rhetoric adopted by certain sovereign states and botanical institutions. Both posturing sustainability through protectionism and fear of the Other. Both adopting a form of desperate, hostile and often absurd control that is wielded on nature and other humans. Certain botanical terms particularly native, neophyte and naturalization, are frequently used in geo-political discourse to form vocabularies of Othering.

In my recent work, I draw new parallels between botanical research and decolonization. More specifically, the boundary between weeds and cultivated or desired ornamental species, and how these colonial ‘discoveries’ are turned on their heads when certain species proliferate at undesirable levels and start affecting ecosystems on a global scale. I’m interested in how this construct – weed – always refers back to what can resist man’s effort to control nature.

Paper-based works are foundational in my approach and influence my installation and video interventions. I consider drawing as an almost perfect language to convey strength and vulnerability in nature. My drawings are large-scale fictional landscapes portraying living species. The species are almost always plants and fish that humans have labeled as a “nuisance” or “invasive”. The use of graphite remains an important aspect of these mostly monochromatic works, suggestive of a binary human mindset, and how we very often limit our understanding of the world that surrounds us by refusing to examine ourselves. Along with large format drawings, my practice unfurls through installation and video-based works. I use film as a language to create a form of poetry and subtlety around ideas that would manifest as too literal with other mediums. Much of my video works and installations rely on happenstance. My practice relies greatly on happenstance, and I gather both footage and objects during my travels or frequent wanders around the town and its surroundings, my swims in the Rhône River or Lake Geneva. The objects and footage once collected, find a life in my studio (sometimes for years) until they are ready to be assembled into a work.

My practice aims to subvert or disarm the false binaries we have been conditioned to, by questioning the human considerations of nature, while inviting the viewer to consider a moment of meditation on life, death, the marginalized, the unnoticed and the forgotten.