The worlds in my work evoke “the central mechanism of Surrealism’s theory of poetry: the experience of ‘disorientation,’ engendered by what Breton called ‘the marvelous ability to reach out, without leaving the field of our experience, to two distinct realities, and bring them together to create a spark.”

Rummana Hussain (1952–1999) is widely considered one of India’s foremost conceptual artists. I had the great fortune of seeing her last solo show before she died, “In Order to Join,” held at Art in General in New York in October 1998. The exhibition was a culmination of a months-long residency, and the convergence of Hussain’s work with this space was, in itself, extraordinary.

Artist Chitra Ganesh maps how the visual language of childhood is produced by powerful ideologies, unpacking a nearly ubiquitous Indian food chart as evidence of the Indian government’s attempts to systematically erase a multivalent, secular, and diverse India.

I’ve had this holographic portrait for decades, having brought it back to the US with me from one of my frequent trips to India as a young adult. It depicts the Buddha and the Dalit scholar B. R. Ambedkar, who became independent India’s first Minister of Law and Justice.

Between You and Me is a series of dialogic exchanges between artists and their collaborators and peers to materialize the countless conversations, musings, and debates that are often invisible, yet play a significant role in the generative space of art-making.

For the past couple of years, I've been thinking a lot more about the performative nature of protest, from dieins on hospital floors and protestors standing in saltwater for weeks on end, to the fine choreography behind scaling a flagpole to remove a confederate flag. These signs and gestures form a visual vocabulary of resistance that accrues great beauty and power in our image-dominated age.