- Research document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2025
- Master Artistic Research
This research begins with memories of monsoon rains in my hometown, stray dogs disappearing after municipal “relocations,” and the recurring ache of loss. These personal moments ground a broader inquiry into nurturing as an active form of care and resistance. Positioned within artistic practice, nurturing emerges not as passive sentiment but as embodied engagement with both human and more-than-human worlds.
Structured through three interconnected acts—re-assembling, re-cognition, and refusal—the work examines how care often collapses under human-centered hegemony yet persists as a regenerative force in creative practice. Reflecting on feminist theorists such as María Puig de la Bellacasa and Gloria Anzaldúa, the study critiques the violence of anthropocentric agencies, where more-than-human beings are used as utility or resources. Through case studies of Dominique White’s shipwreck forms, Maksud Ali Mondal’s installations, and my own ritual work with termite mounds, this research explores how material practices can restore hidden labor, amplify muted voices, and resist extractive narratives.
This research embraces diverse complexity, uncertainty, and situated approaches above linear solutions. It focuses on practices like Bengali women’s ephemeral crafts and collective practices like the Gram Art Project to center marginalized ways of knowing. In doing so, it reimagines art as an ethico-political negotiation. It is an act of attunement to grief, land, and layered histories.
Rather than offering closure, this research stays with the trouble. Nurturing becomes a subtle, subversive, and ongoing dialogue within existing dominant hegemony. It allows working with exploited things, collective grief, and discluded concerns. In an era of clichéd ecological concern, nurturing is not a static ethic, but a resistance lies within contentious mundane rituals that fertilize a ruined soil.
