Rai’s (India) practice moves through making as a way to absorb, reflect, and speculate; interconnecting found materials, research, memory, and fiction to explore themes of spatial negotiation, permeability, and the currents between recollection and amnesia. Her work engages with estuarine geographies, evoking amphibious perspectives/identities and their possibilities across image, text, and installation.
During the residency, Rai is keen to research about the Stranger’s Home in London—which was a 19th-century residential home for south sea sailors— and explore its layered maritime histories, thinking through themes of strangerhood, oceanic littorals, transience, and belonging.
Rai has shown work with Experimenter, Kolkata (2025), Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2024), Goa Familia (2024), Finding Home Symposium, Hochschule Luzern (2023), VIS Nordic Journal of Artistic Research (2023), HH Artspaces Goa, Association of Social Anthropologists, SOAS, UK (2023), among others.
She has participated in the Salzburg Summer Akademie (2024), Biom Alternative Photography Residency (2023), and the Kochi Biennale Graphic Narrative Residency (2018). Rai has received grants and awards from the India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore (2022–23), Goa Open Arts – Catalyst (2021), FICA, Delhi (2021), and Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation (2020).
Rai was born in India and is currently based in Goa, India.
With support from:
In partnership with The Charles Wallace India Trust and The Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation.
Artist’s website
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Please note all artist-in-residence biographies are accurate at the time of their residency. For up-to-date bios please visit the artist’s website.