Body Modalities and Displacement
- Ranjan Kaul
- 4 days ago
- 14 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Payal Arya in conversation with Ranjan Kaul
Payal Arya is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Delhi. She engages with science, ecology, history, and personal narratives to examine the intersection of the self and the non-self. Working across several media, her practice questions ideas of distance, position, and bodily tolerance to rethink what it means to have agency. She is currently teaching within the BFA program at O.P. Jindal Global University.
Some of her exhibitions include a bird flies, a stone is thrown, a collateral at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, supported by Goethe Institute, Pune, and the Gujral Foundation. In 2019, she was invited to Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, where she co-directed Pipio, which later premiered at the India Art Fair in 2023 with the Gujral Foundation. Her film मुड़ पाण दी इच्छा (An Intangible Claim) was presented at the 27th Conference of the Parties in Egypt 2023 and was subsequently screened in Lahore, and recently, at Shiva Andrew Gallery in New York. She has presented her practice at Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, and exhibited at Bayt Al Mamzar in 2025. She has been selected for a residency at Cite internationale des arts in Paris later this year.
Ranjan Kaul: What led you to pursue art after your graduation in psychology? How has been your art journey so far? What challenges have you faced as an artist?
Payal Arya: I pursued a BA in Psychology and Sociology alongside my BFA at Rachana Sansad College of Art and Craft, Mumbai. Having studied within the IB curriculum during grades 11 and 12, I developed a strong interest in artistic research and began seeking ways to integrate interdisciplinary approaches into my art practice. At one point, I also considered pursuing art therapy, which further motivated my decision to undertake a BA alongside my fine arts education.
My academic journey through art school has been shaped by my education across multiple institutions and geographies. I completed a year-long foundation program at FLAME University, Pune but since the university did not offer a Fine Arts program at that time, I moved to Toronto to pursue a BFA at York University. While the program was intellectually engaging, I found it heavily theory-oriented and sorely missed the long hours of studio-based practice. I eventually returned to India and resumed my fine arts education at Rachana Sansad College of Art and Craft. As the program was diploma-based, I was conscious of the need to pursue a degree to enable me to eventually undertake a master’s program in the future.
My search for a balance between practice and theory ultimately led me to pursue two degrees simultaneously. In many ways, the program we have developed at the university today reflects exactly what I had once been searching for: a space that meaningfully integrates theory, research, and art practice. I now teach within the Fine Arts program at O.P. Jindal University, an interdisciplinary artistic program set within the School of Liberal Arts and Humanities.
Ever since I was a young girl, health has been a primary concern for me and a cause of instability. The global pandemic, during which questions of immunity and health came to the forefront, shifted my priorities toward my family, everyday existence, and sustenance. These concerns have informed my practice and transformed the way I think about the body, fragility and precarity.
When I think about the challenges I face as an artist, negotiating infrastructural, economic and political realities immediately come to mind. It is rather challenging to sustain an artistic practice alongside an academic career. A singular medium has not defined my practice; it can vary from the scent I create at a perfumery to exploring violence through smell to creating installations that use smog as a metaphor for political obscurity. The mediums I work with often exist as extensions of traditional gallery practice. I have been grateful to receive support from different organizations; however, sustaining such a practice remains a constant struggle. Each project demands engagement with new technologies and knowledge systems, which can be both challenging and exciting.
RK: What motivates you to work with demanding and disquieting themes such as identity, remembrance, displacement, and violence?
PA: I engage with the modalities of the body: its resistance, tolerance, and endurance of diseases. The inquiry extends beyond my own body to my grandmother’s immobility and forced displacement, allowing individual experience to stand for the collective body politic.
My grandparents were forced to leave their ancestral home in Mian Channu (close to Multan), Pakistan, behind during the Partition. They settled in Pune after moving through several cities. I grew up constantly trying to find an anchor, having not known my extended family, nor having learnt my mother tongue, or the knowledge of our customs. At the young age of seven, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder; since then, my body has been fighting with its own self, not recognizing that part as its own.
To make sense of the displacement within my body and across borders, I turned towards artmaking. Here, I could use metaphors, poetic analogies and express myself. The image allowed me to remove myself from the embodied assault. The helplessness and witnessing that I was forced to do with my body was mirrored outside. There is a sense of imperceptibility in all my work, and it is through dwelling on it that possibilities get revealed to me.
I found resonance within ecological frameworks. I came across a film that addressed mycelium networks (mushrooms are the fruiting body of mycelium). When a tree doesn’t get nutrition from the mycelium, it sometimes sheds its tree tips, and resorts to eating its bark, and eventually dies. I also became interested in the first living organisms that perished because of the oxygen they produced during their life span.
Thus, ecology becomes a metaphor to talk about the human condition. For instance, the comb moving insistently on a stone that was produced under hundreds of years of pressure. In another work, the condition of a cataract was connected to the current state of political obscurity.
RK: You have been exploring various media including installation, kinetic sculpture, film besides the more traditional mediums such as drawing, painting, and print-making. How and when do you decide which medium would be most appropriate for your expression? What has been your experience as a collaborating artist for film and photogrammetry-VR projects?
PA: My medium of expression shifts with each artwork; I derive from the conceptual framework and material explorations. To exemplify, while living in Mumbai, I created an interactive installation that had fake hands protruding within a dark, narrow tunnel that brushed against the visitor’s body. The structure allowed only one person to enter at a time, while a CCTV camera recorded their reactions. The work addressed the experience of violation and questioned structures of power, control, and surveillance. Over the ten-day duration, the installation was experienced by more than 60,000 visitors. It sparked conversations around gendered violence and became a space for people to share personal memories of trauma and harassment. Later, when the same installation was showcased at O.P. Jindal University, it momentarily lifted the hierarchies between the staff, students and faculty to a more gendered discourse.
I was invited to go to the Filmakademie in 2019-2020 for a film residency. I worked with Aditi Kulkarni, a fellow artist who was also invited there to co-write and direct our film Pipio, a variation of which was also shown at the Kochi Muzirus Biennale 2025-2026 (and supported by the Goethe Institute, Pune, and the Gujral Foundation) as a collateral in the form of a multi-channel installation. The film and installation trace their origin to Rubble Hill in Stuttgart, a hill created by piling the debris of the past. It questions whether our collective global pain has circled back by coincidence, or it persists as a residue of the past, refusing to dissolve. The videos were in the form of tableaux; they held several characters following a singular act, such as the dinner scene, which was an analogy for war for us.
Making the film was a transformative experience. Working with a cast and crew of over 40 people, coming together over six rigorous months in a different country to create a single work, shifted my understanding of collaboration and artistic practice. The project continued to evolve long after the film was completed; the installation version took another six years to be showcased.
The photogrammetry film was derived through the pandemic; Aditi and I returned to India on the last flight before the lockdown. Within the precarity of the situation, we sought an archive of the current global scenario. We put out an open call for people to share their stories, isolation spaces and sent them demonstrations to make their own 3D space through an open-source photogrammetry software. The software became a creative tool to trace fragments of reality – the visitor enters and trespasses the private spaces, through a screen, which were otherwise closed.
RK: What is the process of your art creation? What triggers a project – a concept, an experience, or both? Where is your regular workplace / studio?
PA: Artmaking for me is not limited to a singular technology, medium or process and neither is it restricted to a space. It begins with a glimpse of an image or an affect that I then engage with through material exploration and research. It is through this journey that the image/ experience reveals itself to me. I like the viewer to have the same encounter through affective spaces that they would inhabit, through the slow revelation and encounter within an artwork or installation.
The studio for me is a shifting entity; I work out of scientific labs, perfumeries, factories and my laptop. I move between teaching and work/research – I teach in Sonipat for a few days, while I’m in Delhi the rest of the time. During the semester break, I go back to my hometown, Pune. However, this is not the reason for a porous studio practice. With each new work, there is usually a different medium to explore, frequently requiring me to engage with an expert in that particular field. The process is both daunting and exhilarating, as one never fully knows what one might discover.
RK: Could you describe a couple of art projects that you found most fulfilling?
PA: More than an art project, the biggest achievement for me has been to find my Naani’s (maternal grandmother) home for her post-Partition in Mian Channu, Pakistan - she saw her home, school and the temple she used to visit. Virtually, she was able to walk the same streets again and her hometown after 75 years. Having grown up hearing her stories, I knew she had this one desire to revisit the home she left behind.
Artists from India and Pakistan were paired to create video works set within a landscape across the border. This was facilitated through Experimenter Kolkata’s workshop during the pandemic. A fellow residency artist, Farrukh Adnan, discovered that his grandmother’s town, Mian Channu, was also where my Naani once lived. Through a video call, he traced its streets via the Sanathan Dharam Mandir. Naani was moved to see the same floor tiles still intact after 75 years. Her home had turned into a cotton factory, now owned by a man who, after much hesitation, invited her to visit, though she never returned in her lifetime.
मुड़ पाण दी इच्छा An Intangible Claim, the film I made connected two moments in time: the voiceover of the Naani’s stories around Partition and the visuals of the present-day ecological crisis of Land Reclamation. I was paired with Karachi-based artist Ayesha Naveed, who showed me the flood lines inscribed onto her walls, climbing higher each year. She spoke of her anxieties around an impending deluge and the prospect of losing her home.
Naani’s yearning was embodied by the sea that surges in claiming the land that was once its own, metaphorically tying together the phenomenon of Partition and the current ecological crisis of land reclamation. The film questioned what it means to claim and own land, yesterday and today. It was a found-footage film, as it was a land I only knew from a distance.
Post my Naani’s death, I cast her slippers in stainless steel. At 13, Naani had a forced migration and a forced immobility and in her 70s, when she had an accident that left her immobile. The fall led to a hip replacement surgery, and a metal ball was put in her leg. The operation caused one leg to be shorter than the other; her slippers had to be customized as per the difference.
This was showcased as an installation recently, where it also had her scent that I had created with a perfumist. In a corner of the room, a shelf held photos that Naani had accidentally clicked without realizing of the room she was confined to for over 20 years of her life. The photos held within them a fragmented memory of the time she had spent alone.
RK: In what way does your teaching and researching art contribute to your art practice?
PA: I have found teaching deeply rewarding, one has to constantly engage with ideas. It is fascinating to learn about students’ curiosities and build a discourse through shared research. We have a wonderful cohort of artists teaching, where conversations and critical exchange form an important aspect of building the program together.
I have also been looking after the international collaborations and exchange possibilities for the program. This could be in the form of joint classrooms or seminars across different organizations, facilitating dialogue and discursive inquiry.
Material exploration is central to any bachelor’s program. One central skill that we have tried to introduce as a program is the ability to read an image and reflect through the production of a visual language. We have also actively encouraged practice-based research, where knowledge is generated through the process of making itself.
I see the University as a space not only to experiment and meaning-making, but also as a site of reflection. It is engaging to think of pedagogical frameworks that can push an examination of one’s surroundings and to think through the context one is located within.
While living and working in Sonipat, I produced a body of work around the exploration of distance and visibility, locating my field of vision where the horizon keeps shifting with respect to the atmosphere and the stubble burning at the onset of every winter. Through the video, I attempt to understand the nature of resistance and visual obscurity.
Teaching has helped me remain intellectually engaged and to delve deeper into my own inquiries. The momentum and academic rigour the program brings are also carried forward within my practice.
RK: Would you like to share with our readers any new project that you are currently engaged with?
PA: The body of work I’m working on highlights the negotiation and resilience of the physical body. I’m compelled to find meaning within my autoimmune condition rather than a cure. I wish to understand the moment of onset, the trigger. I have also been reading philosophical concepts around the mediation of the self and non-self.
I found resonance through ecological frameworks, a tree deprived of nutrition from mycelium networks ends up eating its own bark or how the first microorganisms perished due to the oxygen they produced. Seeking an image of these imperceptible forms, I recorded planktons at a natural history display within a children’s theme park in Dubai where evolutionary narratives were staged as spectacle.
Intrigued by the unfolding within the body, I plan to explore imaging techniques such as confocal microscopy to study the movement of cells within autoimmunity, and how cells pre-empt a trigger, misrecognition and attack.
In a previous work, I worked with a scientist to grow mycelium on a television, a parasitic growth on a surface that does not have its own image. For this installation, I am experimenting with decay and corrosion.
I am currently working on an installation reflecting on the limits of bodily tolerance. It begins with resilience of the body, but then leads to ecological, political and social intimations of tolerance. [1]
RK. As in the case of your work, contemporary art across the globe has now become increasingly multidisciplinary and immersive? Do you see this trend becoming popular in India? It is said that the Indian art world has become elitist. Do you agree with this view? What do you think can be done to enable the visual arts more inclusive and accessible to the common person in the country?
PA: The relationship between art and life has always been quite blurred. Art’s nature, being multidisciplinary, does not feel like a contemporary phenomenon. It is derived through the anxieties and crises that form each epoch in society. Each era has given rise to a new form of expression that it required.
Contemporary art practice is derived from the context of our current society. The spillage of media from one form to another is the continuous sensory framework we are embedded within. Our relationship with media has shifted; war is being streamed on the same platform that we use for leisure. It feels as though we are continuously on the brink of a crisis. This has given rise to a different reception and production of artmaking.
Indian art realm can be quite multi-faceted; there are many variations of the art world, the gallery space, alternative infrastructures, museum space, gatherings and collaborations can also be taken into the purview of the art world. Because of this complexity, it is difficult to characterize it through a single lens or reduce it to being simply elitist. It can, in turn, be seen as an intersecting world with multiple modes of engagement.
I have also found a strength in the impulse of artists coming together to produce a dialogue through practice. One such collaboration was with fellow artist Meher Afroz. We reflected upon the overlaps and spillages observed within our artistic practice and pitched it to several organizations in Dubai. The lens of the landscape became a point of departure, while Meher reflected on the desert as both harsh and generative, my practice lingered at the shoreline — tracing the affective and ecological shifts of disappearing land.
The photogrammetry film also began with a similar impulse; it became an archive of everyone who wanted to contribute. The site of dissemination is one way to make the artwork more inclusive and accessible. “When no one is looking” was displayed in the public domain and became a safe space for discourse for everyone who encountered it.
The site, medium, and mode of dissemination should not be predetermined; they emerge from the conceptual and material concerns of the work itself.
While thinking about accessibility, I feel it is also important to retain the poetics and nuances within an artwork. For each person to witness something new every time one encounters the work. Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky speaks about using metaphors to build an image:
“An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.”
Sometimes people may encounter a work and leave without fully understanding its meaning. The work might cause reflection or remain long after the encounter as a sensation or provocation.
RK: Finally, besides the visual arts, what are your other interests? How do they influence your art?
PA: I enjoy conversations with people from varied disciplines and listening to their stories, their existential inquiries. I’ve earlier worked with people from different disciplines – engineers, scientists, ecologists. It interests me to observe the shared resonances and intersections.
A lot of my practice has also been derived through conversations with my Naani or with people around me. Recently, as an alternative exhibition format, a group of artists came together to inhabit a domestic space where conversations and togetherness became primary rather than individual art practices.
I situated my intervention in the kitchen and invited the visitors to eat gulab jamun while listening to two interwoven narratives around food and thirst. One, my Naani’s recollections of Partition: of her childhood stories around the abundance of food entangled with the poisoned wells she encountered during the long journey going across the border. On the kitchen’s other side, Pyaari Aunty, who works in my locality in Sonipat, reflected on her lived experience. She spoke of the scarcity of procuring food in her day-to-day life and the grief of losing her child. The two voices played simultaneously, merging at the kitchen centre; one had to move closer to either side to listen.
Accompanying these were remedy books, including one by my Naani, containing an archive of cures for each family member – newspaper cuttings, recipes and ancestral knowledge systems. Another was a remedy book for the diseases that both Pyaari Aunty and I shared and gathered through second-hand books and personal archives of relatives.
I plan to build an archive of generational remedies through conversations across households; the process of gathering them will itself become part of the artwork. A collective knowledge system that is on the verge of being lost.
(All images are courtesy of the artist Payal Arya.)
[1] Tolerance here refers to the sensory overload and to Immune Tolerance (Subject Collection from Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology) 1st Edition by Diane J. Mathis, Alexander Y. Rudensky, 2013
Ranjan Kaul is a visual artist, art writer and critic, curator, published fiction author, and Founding Partner of artamour. His works may be viewed on www.ranjankaul.com and his Instagram handle @ranjan_creates.
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