“THE HIGHEST EDUCATION IS THAT WHICH DOES NOT MERELY GIVE US INFORMATION BUT MAKES OUR LIFE IN HARMONY WITH ALL EXISTENCE.” – Rabindranath Tagore, Personality (1917), Nobel Laureate in Literature (1913).
STATEMENT
Through new media, performance, ludic spaces, installation, math geometry, text/speech, songs/mantras, I explore the topic of compassion/self compassion and inner joybeyond matter and mind. With compassion, my work navigates the inner tension between reductionism in science and the permissions of art. Through lived experience, I have come to see how scientific reductionism mirrors social biases and fixed categories.
Before turning to art, I studied and worked in engineering and natural sciences. Unable and limited to articulate my transgender experience, this tension opened a path toward spiritual search.
I have been inspired by pre-Columbian wisdom and ancestral cultures/deities. Notable examples include the Tida Wena (Warao) in Venezuela, indigenous peoples of the Andes, the Kinnar/Hijra in India, and the story of goddess Quan Yin. Although I do not belong to these communities, they have inspired me to reflect on my own origins and spirituality, on who we are after leaving the physical body. As an initiated Vaishnava, I am inspired by Hindu stories of deities like Radhe Krishna and Katyayani Devi, as well as saints like Sri Lalita Sakhi Dasi (Sakhi Ma), Ramanujacharya and Sage Ashtavakra whose body was bent/ deformed (Hunchback) and people laughed aloud at his appearance.
This exploration responds to ostracism, exotification, pathologisation, humilliations and life-threatening situations I’ve faced as a transgender woman in both private and public spaces. In my experience, violence is neither male nor female, as both men and women can be violent. The root of such to me is the lack of Love. Love as Prem in Sanskrit. Love as the opposite of fear. From my perspective the most painful harm is, when we hold internalise oppression against ourselves when we’re too scared to be who we truly are.
I am not interested in Descartes’ theory of dualism (1641), which separates mind from body, or in mechanistic paradigms like Newtonian physics that reduce the universe as a machine composed of discrete, interacting parts, as these frameworks limit both my being and my art.
In contrast, quantum thinking is for me a conceptual tool that opens up the rigid dualisms “us versus them” or “man versus nature”, emphasising entanglement, compassion andthe observer’s connection to the observed. Max Planck, a pioneer of quantum theory, showed that energy exists in discrete packets, or ‘quanta.’ He later stated, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness” (The Observer, 1931). His work suggested an interconnected universe.
These explorations led to the installation Post Cyborg Awakening (2017),Pineapple Laboratories a utopic safe space / memorial where transwomen are not reduced to the material body but recognised in spirit. In the work Pachamama(2021-23) I explore co-creatively the topic environmental compassion and connexion to Mother Earth. Recent works include What is in Me (2024), Call of the Universe dedicated to the Hindu Goddess Radha, and The Jewel Jellyfish Collection (2023-24), Trasnochada exploring self-compassion as bioluminescence.