Chidakash (forthcoming)
Chidakash experimentally explores the visual language of early Hindu mythological cinema and television, focusing on the era of trick effects and their evolution from the 1940s to the 1980s. Drawing from scenes of battles, transformations, divine interventions and supernatural encounters, the film reworks fragments of mythological imagery through montage, layering and repetition.
too tired for anxiety [2026]
Single-channel film, digital video, 16mm and archival material, 31.28 minutes
too tired for anxiety is a fragmentary dream diary exploring memories of childhood nightmares alongside early encounters with cinema. Drawing on recollections of vivid dreams and sleep disturbances following encounters with 1980s American horror - particularly A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) the film moves through association, repetition and rhythm, unfolding like a night of dreaming.
Filmed over five years, the work gradually became a form of diary, investigation and therapy. Most scenes were shot alone at night with a 16mm Bolex camera, combining observations of London with experimental reconstructions, memories and fragments. At its centre is the experience of loneliness at night and the question of how alone we are in our nighttime experiences, particularly as children. The film considers how horror, religion, migration, class, race, gender and sexuality become entangled within childhood imagination, and how the fears and desires of one generation can enter another’s dream life.
The film builds towards and pivots around the scene 'night lessons', which was shot during a solitary night walk through London (Southall, Shoreditch and Soho) on the night in 2024 when Diwali and Halloween coincided. The movement is therefore from memory into the present and from the interior world of a sleep-walking child to an adult walking through the night. The film draws on the visual and emotional language of 1980s and 1990s South Asian diaspora culture, Bollywood and Indian cinema, as well as the aesthetics of 1980s American horror.
रात Raat (Night) [2023] glass
Raat is a life sized glass replica of Freddy Krueger's glove; one of a series of glass artworks being prepared to serve as props in forthcoming films.
रात Raat (Night): Installation view, Univ. of Nottingham, Elm Street at 40 symosium and exhibition [2024]
Threat Simulation 1 (2023) [stills: 16mm film converted to digital, 7']
Threat Simulation 1 documents a live prosthetic make-up event staged within an art gallery. A young South Asian man is prepared to assume the appearance of the iconic American horror film character Freddy Krueger, for a role he is to perform in a dream sequence set in the 1980s. The event forms part of an ongoing body of work, The Krueger Institute, which examines the relationship between dreaming, trauma and film spectatorship through forensic and psychoanalytic lenses, with particular reference to the A Nightmare on Elm Street film series.
Fair (2024) [stills: 16mm film converted to digital]
Untitled (2021) [monoprint]
Saeculum (2021) [moving image 3']
Set in a garden in Southall, West London, the experimental film Saeculum revolves around the construction of a bird house by my father using scrap material during the lockdown of the 2020 pandemic. Simultaneously, I document this process through the use of clay. These practices become a portal for reflecting on a life’s work in the construction industry, the memories of establishing a new home in a foreign country and the unrealised common ground found between us through the practice of making. Funded by the UK Asian Film Festival and Arts Council, England.
Empirical Sleepwalks (2018) [Film, 18']
Empirical Sleepwalks is an experimental essay film that begins with a collage of what I describe as ‘found memories’ of a time before I was born. These memories centre on the story of my grandmother, who was part of a group that established the first Hindu temple in Southall, West London, in 1978, the same year as widespread National Front protests against the growing Indian population in the area.
Narrated by my mother, much of this (post)memory is a composite of what I was told, film and photographic documentation, and the traces and legacies of this period in Southall following 1978 - a time marked by dramatic socio-political change and intense racism.
Empirical Sleepwalks (2018) [installation views]
Untitled (2019) [monoprint]
Installation view, London, 2009
The Victory 1979 (2009) [Oil on wood, reclaimed wrought iron - constructed pub sign]
The Victory is a reimagined pub sign for a pub that once existed in Southall, West London and was popular among the South Asian diaspora in the 1970s and 80s. Drawing on accounts of pub culture from the period, the work explores how pub signs and their imagery reflected ideas of racial and class difference, and how pubs became spaces of both exclusion and cultural negotiation.
The painted image is based on a family photograph taken in 1979 and stands in ironic contrast to the pub’s name. Rather than symbolising triumph, the complexities and struggles of migration and diasporic life, including racism, economic hardship and social exclusion are evoked. By placing a personal family image within the visual language of the traditional British pub sign, the work challenges nostalgic ideas of Britishness and belonging, reflecting on how migrant communities were made simultaneously hyper-visible and structurally invisible.
Untitled (2019) [monoprint]
Mirrors - a graphic novel (2018) [glass paint on mirror]
Mirrors - a graphic novel (2018 - Present) [glass paint on mirror]
Mirrors is a graphic novel on mirror. It is an ongoing series of paintings began in 2018 which draws on personal memories of growing up in the 1980s/ 90s.
Fifty Punches 1 (2017) [monoprint]
Monoprints (2018-2020)
Pankot Palace - Growing Pains (2018) [film, 2.15']
Growing Pains Series (2018)
Growing Pains is a series of animations created by manipulating film sequences and sound. The works draw on films and television serials I remember watching as a young child, particularly those that affected me through their intensity. The series distorts and reconfigures the ‘low-tech’ animation, fantasy and melodrama embraced by filmmakers in both the East and West during the 1970s and 80s.
In The Battle, two battle scenes are played against each other: one from Sinbad and the other from a popular Indian television series depicting the battles of a Hindu deity.
Untitled (2019) Monoprints
Monoprints (2018)
Untitled (2009) [collage]
Haridwaar (2019) Photo Lithograph
Fifty Punches (2017) [monoprint]
First Punch (2017) [monoprint]
Untitled (2018) [cyanotype]
Untitled (2020) [etching]
Madhurai Mart (2009) [Installation mixed media]
Madhurai Mart (2009) [Installation – mixed media]
The imagined market stall Madhurai Mart sells toys and ornaments depicting figures from Indian mythology alongside superheroes and characters from Western comics and popular culture. The work was inspired by an American company that had started to produce superhero versions of Hindu deities, an example of what has been described as ‘hyper hybridity’. By bringing these seemingly disparate figures together within the familiar setting of a market stall, the work explores the ways religious imagery, popular culture and consumerism intersect within diasporic experience.
Sketches (2020 - Present) [Acrylic on Paper]
Untitled (2021) [Acrylic on canvas]
Sweets (2021) [Acrylic on Paper]