Art Blog | Contemporary Art Discourse & Critical Writing

On Connections, Parallels and Contradictions

Published on 15 May 2026

An on-site residency networking gathering of local artists and international artists, curators, and performers currently in residency or research trip in Switzerland at Amerbach Studios, Basel, kick-started my fourth week in Switzerland. Greetings were exchanged and introductions made over a delicious meal prepared by Luzia Schuler, followed by a lecture performance by Golschan Ahmad Haschemi, …

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Vestibular Criticism: A Podcast

Published on 27 June 2025

Podcasting is a relatively new form of critical engagement with contemporary art and its discourses. In this presentation, I propose to explore the relationship between writing and aurality in the context of decolonial art criticism. My art podcasting practice so far has been invested in the interview or the conversation as a method of producing …

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Polyglot Polyphony

Published on 27 June 2025

This is the last week of my residency. There are two thoughts I want to unpack in this penultimate note. I have tried to connect with or explore the possibility of pursuing connections with scholars, critics, curators and audio producers from the various linguistic constituencies of Switzerland — the German-speaking part where I was based, …

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Alter Vox/ Vox Sui

Published on 27 June 2025

This week, too, I am thinking about voice – not through the internal/external dyad, but the literal/ metaphorical one. I am preparing for my residency production, a podcast co-conducted with Geraldine Tedder, the director of Kunsthalle Winterthur. Emails are written, meetings arranged and a slot reserved at the Bibliothek Winterthur’s recording studio for my last …

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Ekphrasis, Orature and Translation

Published on 27 June 2025

Following on from last week’s post about the ‘writerly supravocalisation’, I decide to revisit the oft-discussed matter of readerly subvocalisation, to see if it can illuminate something new. I turn to Garrett Stewart’s idea, in his book Reading Voices, of the ‘phonotext’, the ‘silent sounding of a text’ that undergirds the meaning-making which happens through …

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Writing Across and Down : Transcribing and Describing

Published on 07 May 2025

“Do you mind if I record?” Interviewing podcasters and oral historians of visual art in Switzerland has been an enriching exercise. Sometimes I record the conversation on my phone. Other times, I find that writing down in shorthand helps keep the flow authentic. As a writer and researcher, I often use interviews as raw material …

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Three Formats of Aural Writing

Published on 29 April 2025

This week had a number of highlights in terms of thinking through my research proposal. In a throwback to school field trips, our residency director took all us residents of Villa Sträuli to the Kunsthaus Zürich, to view a retrospective of Roman Signer, one of the most significant Swiss conceptual artists. We scattered across the …

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From the Ghor to the Gallery: Liberating the Feminine Realm in Indian Art

Published on 26 April 2025

From the Ghor to the Gallery: Liberating the Feminine Realm in Indian Art In one of his seminal essays, Partha Chatterjee (Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women: The Contest in India) argues that Indian nationalism, in its resistance to British colonialism and Western modernity, constructed a rigid ideal of womanhood that ultimately reinforced a new patriarchal …

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“Listening In and Finding Balance”

Published on 22 April 2025

This is my first week’s dispatch from the AWA residency at Villa Sträuli in Winterthur, supported by Pro Helvetia and TAKE On Art. I have enjoyed scrumptious cake with my co-residents, and fantastic home-cooked dinner with my research guide in Zürich. Before arriving in Winterthur, my fantasies of Switzerland were limned with the Kodak patina …

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Open Studio: museum of silence, a visual essay on intergenerational silence between women

Published on 10 June 2024

This week I had an open studio where I exhibited the tactile engagement I have been toiling with past few weeks here. I saw the Museum of Silence, that so far existed in a word document and inside the walls of my studio, now exhibited to the world. Gracefully hung in the open studio of …

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