THE CRIMINAL TRIBES:
RE-MEMBERING THE DISPOSSESSED
(Multimedia Installation, Artistic Research)

Departing from an excerpt from a 1925 Salvation Army campaign film, The Criminal Tribes is an artistic research project that investigates the afterlives of dispossessed traditional ornaments, housed in museum collections in the UK, Netherlands and India. It traces these ornaments from their documented removal to their subsequent collection and circulation, situating this history within the British Colonial Government’s mass criminalisation and forced settlement of nomadic communities across South Asia.

2024

(DIS) LOCATING DESIGN GLOBALISMS
(Visual Essay, Research)

Commissioned by DesignPlatform Rotterdam and the Design Museum in Den Bosch, this visual essay examines the historical entanglement of modern design with neo-colonial projects of development. Departing from the 1971 iconic photograph of the Earth, The Blue Marble, it traces the migration of Western Industrial design ideologies into South Asia through the Green Revolution in India and the mass-installation of hand pumps in Bangladesh led by the UNDP. The essay interrogates the worlds rendered invisible by the universalising promises of modernity and asks what worlds are present, and absent, within the practice of design.

Supported by:
Designplatform Rotterdam
Design Museum den Bosch

2024

FOOTPRINTS OF CELESTIAL DANCERS:
A WAKE FOR HEAVENLY BODIES
(Multimedia Installations, Socially-Engaged Research)

A long-term collaborative artistic research project tracing the displacement of an Apsara statue from Khajuraho (central India), now housed in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, and its entanglement with the eviction of Devadasi communities from public life in South India. Through the figure of the Apsara, the project thinks about how restitution might extend beyond the return of objects, but to explore healing, and the return of dignity and justice.

Supported by:
Stimuleringsfonds
KVVAK

2025

LIVING KNOWLEDGES OF THE ENDANGERED
(Multimedia Installations, Socially-Engaged Research)

Living Knowledges of the Endangered is a collaborative artistic research project working with Vaidyar (Indigenous healers) families in Malabar to explore counter-archival perspectives from the “cosmological other” (Ahmed Ansari, 2022), while engaging in dialogue with botanical gardens, ethnobotanical collections and natural history museums in the Netherlands. The project asks what epistemic justice might mean in relation to ecological health, and the relationships of knowledge, care and land that sustain it.

Supported by:
Stimuleringsfonds

2026 - ONGOING

VESSEL OF THE DAIVAS
(Multimedia Installations, Socially-Engaged Research)

An artistic research project exploring what happened when Kaavus and other sacred groves—sacred forest or natural regions constituted through relationships between humans, deities, ancestors and land—were translated into colonial categories of forest, property and land. The project traces how colonial law, socio-cultural interventions and scholarship enabled these onto-epistemic shifts, and what was displaced, transformed or made invisible in the process.

2026 - ONGOING