graduation project

Borders and nations are recent imaginary lines drawn by strangers that dictate where we can exist. Throughout history, borders have shifted, flags have changed, and governments have fallen. Each redrawing of the map is accompanied by new stories crafted to legitimize national identities, making the new map seem timeless. Yet these constructs, despite their fragility, cause disruption and segregation.

My current project examines migration and cultural negotiation through intimate narratives around my friends and family who have returned to India after years abroad. It explores the dissonance between imagined foreign lands and migrants' lived realities, reflecting on the psychological toll of perpetual liminality while critiquing restrictive migration policies and the racialized privilege of movement. At its core lies a question: if you leave a place, do you ever truly return to it?

Medium-format analog photographic development, like migration, is slow and uncertain, marked by the unknown and a realization that unfolds over time. Merging the digital with the analog not only evokes the past but also brings it into dialogue with the present, challenging colonial narratives. These images move beyond mere documentation; they become active, transformative, and performative acts. They resist imposed identities and ways of seeing.

By using domestic objects as vessels of memory, the work resists monolithic migration narratives and reclaims the migrant gaze, portraying resilience, agency, and belonging beyond frameworks of assimilation or productivity. These concerns are rooted in South Asia's long histories of migration and cultural anthropology.

Positioned between memory and transformation, my practice calls for a rethinking of borders, nationality, and citizenship. It confronts the appropriation of decolonial language by nationalist regimes and rejects civilizational hierarchies that silence minority voices. In doing so, it seeks to dismantle both physical and ideological borders, opening space for collective liberation, new forms of belonging, and a world where no one is an outsider.