My practice centers around my desire to understand the meaning of home and its role in the creation of one’s sense of self. I create films using video and audio recordings I capture on a day-to-day basis along with archival films and images in the pursuit of forging feelings of longing and contemplation. I strive to make my audience introspect on their own sense of identity through a lens of home; wherein home encompasses everything from people to places, cultures to legalities, and memories to daydreams.

I have an oscillating relationship with different “homes” in my life as an Indian citizen who grew up in the UAE and now lives in the UK. When I lived in Dubai, I called India my “home” and now I live in the UK calling Dubai my “home”. Is it all transitory then? More interestingly, is it my evolving sense of self that is changing what I view as my home, or is my dispersed home scattering my notion of self? These are the questions I am asking through my films.

I have developed a regular practice of observing and recording (audio and video) my environments; this includes everything from nature to snippets of conversations, pieces of music, significant places, and even random insignificant things – anything that catches my attention. These vignettes of my life become the pieces that I can weave into a narrative on the editing table. It is only at the editing stage that I find aesthetic, thematic, or emotional links between these visuals and audios, thereby forming groups that become threads to interweave.

The concepts of dialogical selves, and hybridity of cultures and identities are integral in the theoretical grounding of my work, particularly as explored by Bhatia and Ram (2004) and Homi K. Bhabha (1994). These theoretical writings prompted me to view the self as not one unified whole, but a myriad of selves that coexist. As for the making of my work, I am greatly inspired by Phoebe Boswell’s exploration of home and identity, specifically in her video installation called I Dream of a Home I Cannot Know (2019) which creates a meditative state for the viewers to experience a place significant to the artist filmed across time. My editing, sense of rhythm and flow of tension is greatly influenced by artists like Elizebeth Price, whose sense of musicality and storytelling is very compelling to me.