My artistic practice stands on the intersection  between live art, theatre, painting, photography, sculpture,  installation and pedagogy. My performances, in large part improvised, dwell on issues such as identity, the role of autobiography, the pose and self-portraiture, reflect on the process of transformation and the part played by  duration of the performance.

I travel extensively with my work. Every place offers a new set of circumstances, a different political and ecological environment, often in contrast to home. For this reason, every performance and every drawing is unique and impossible to repeat. Collaborations with artist to make photographs, costumes and sets. Shivani Gupta has been consistently documented my performances and Loise Braganza has been designing costumes for my personae since 2009.

The drawings made in my studio function as rehearsal acts for performances. There is a symbiotic and synergetic relationship between both the modes of operation and creation, thinking through drawing but also through the body. The many drawing performances made in the last decade echo the spirit of travel, transience and nomadism. The personas I create engage with landscapes and cityscapes as subjects. They express my commitment to observation as an active form of engagement with a place. Most of my drawings emerge from this point, as they become the beginning of a dialogue. 

As a child, I spent many summers in the picturesque village of Pahalgham, Kashmir with my grandparents in their little cottage on the Liddar River. They had to sell their home in 1989, when the area became politically troubled. These early formative years of my life were framed within this landscape. Later, as a young backpacker on long treks - sketchbook in hand - I was confronted by the magnitude of the hard mountains and the soft galaxy that gazed upon me. There was a familiar feeling of awe for this landscape and its bounteous enormity. 

The sea has played a crucial role in my life and my imagination. I have spent many years in port towns: Dubai, Bombay, Baltimore, New York City, Bahrain and Kochi. Looking out into the sea at the horizon line has always offered fresh air, respite and a sense of hope. I feel like I am surrounded by water. And now that I live in Goa, the infinite perspective of the sea and the imagination of what’s beyond the horizon line are very connected to my present. I immerse myself in this water, I swim in this water, and I bathe in this water. I have begun to feel like I am of this water.

Every few years I visit Kashmir in search of an innocence lost. Like in the summer of 2018, I walked 120 km over nine days in the Liddar Valley, looking down onto Pahalgham. 4,000 meters above sea level I looked at - and drank from - pristine high-altitude lakes. I had a desire to commune with nature and confront its fragility. I wanted to make drawings in-situ, for instance of Kolahoi Glacier (which has receded 2.3 km since 2003). I wanted to talk to the Gujjars, the Bakkarwals and the Chopwans: nomadic tribes, borderless, who have been grazing their livestock in these remote regions for several thousand years, away from modern civilization. In all this, there was a deep desire to return to and represent the mountains again and again, to record them, to connect with that human instinct that is as old as the people who walked these glaciers. 

The last ten years in Goa have been rewarding as much as they have been troubling. My time has been spent with nature at sea level in the salty humidity of tropical coast of the Arabian Sea; through paddy fields or on the beach. In contrast the rapid pace at which urbanisation is moving, is quickly turning villages into Suburbia, where beaches like Baga look more like Las Vegas than the sleepy fishing villages they were.

In the need to be part of critical change a small community of artist came together to create HH Art Spaces in 2014. As a co-founder and active participant at HH Art Spaces - I have interacted and collaborated with a diverse range of performance artists, dancers, film makers, costume/textile designers, and musicians; local and international. These invaluable interdisciplinary experiments, performance lab jams and open studio days have expanded my vocabulary and repertoire. Simultaneously, my relationship to studio-based drawing practice has seen a renewed energy, in the quietude of the rhythms and processes of my private studio. 

I want to understand the mysteries of what is up beyond the mountain pass, and down in the depths of the ocean. As forms, they mirror each other as opposing forces: the mountain juts upwards and the ocean  plunges downwards. At those moments when the reflection of mountains in water has become viscerally real to me - in Musandam, Oman or Mt. Oympus, Greece – the corporeality of the act of drawing becomes heightened and clear. The act of drawing becomes a poetic and political tool for recording, remembering, memorizing and recalling.