My integration into American culture generated many difficulties concerning assimilation and the retention of traditional Muslim-Indian values. As a first-generation immigrant, much of what was passed down to me as embodied knowledge from my parents manifests itself as cultural baggage in my daily life. Through my work I ask, what happens in the difficult process of acculturation when the embodied knowledge of a former culture is dislocated from place? When it becomes a suspended web of signifiers in new, deterritorialized spaces?
My artistic sensibility comes from interpreting these acts of cultural hybridization. Why do some cultural signifiers become re-appropriated by both the dominant and immigrant culture to perform new functions and meanings, while others are lost and relegated to the dustbins of culture? I explore ways to collage images to simulate these acts of appropriation and loss; by forcing, cutting, negotiating, and creating anew. The work becomes my way of externalizing my own daily experience.
Borders and landscapes figure prominently in my work. While visually they serve as a backdrop in my paintings, the symbolism of trees, mountains, and bodies of water produce a layer of affect upon which my subjects and objects can be lost, found, and displaced. My paintings represent the imagined landscapes that migrant communities project and have projected on to them by dominant cultures. Characters are spatially suspended in familiar yet foreign landscapes. These landscapes represent borders of immigrant identities in flux. They gesture at the potential for new identification through distilled but familiar iconic imagery.
Severed from chartable geographies and anchored subject positions, my characters remind us that the contemporary is in constant eviction. Living between two cultures, but fully occupying neither, I do not ascribe the present to a sense of place. Instead, I distill my own cultural icons into painterly figures that become connective tissues to collapse physical distances and highlight the emotional connections and cultural projections between seemingly disparate cultures. The result is that of a parallax effect. I am able to construct the tensions of parallel vantage points between two merging cultures through my unique positioning.
I recognize that contemporary art does not exist in its own aesthetic bubble. My work draws from pop culture, Western and South Asian aesthetic traditions, and the disciplines of Anthropology and Cultural Studies. My artistic approach is multidisciplinary, and follows these shifting cultural spaces through many mediums, including painting, drawing, and video work.