Kushala Vora.
Artist in Residence at Shillim
Medium: Multidisciplinary
Year: 2024
Kushala Vora’s practice centers on undoing standardized ways of perceiving landscape. At Shillim, through daily walks with forest guards, she engaged the terrain as a shifting, relational field. These walks became both method and material, allowing her to observe generational differences in ecological knowledge and lived familiarity with land. Shillim offered a space where she could decenter artistic authority and instead collaborate with matter—clay, stone, plants, and found objects—as active participants. The residency also opened a social dimension: exchanges with forest guards led to shared acts of seeing, photographing, and singing. Their interactions revealed how perception is learned collectively, and how tools like phone cameras reshape visual agency. For Vora, Shillim was less a site of output and more a space of gathering—of sensations, relationships, and questions that would later unfold into form.
The artwork that emerged from this period resists singular definition, instead taking shape as a dispersed, multi-layered body of work that includes a collaboratively produced book, photographic explorations, sculptural compositions, and material experiments. Central to this body of work is her interest in disrupting linear narratives and hierarchical authorship. The book itself embodies this: it opens from both ends, incorporates multiple voices, and interweaves essays, poems, images, and transparencies. Rather than explaining the work, the texts function as parallel pathways, inviting readers to construct their own associations. This structure reflects her broader aim to challenge how knowledge is ordered and consumed.
Together, these elements form an artwork that is less an object and more an ecosystem of relations—between people, materials, and ways of knowing—continually resisting closure and inviting ongoing interpretation.
