Phantasms of the Blue Sky

The series holds space for multidimensional narratives of journeys (diasporic, into inner worlds and through speculative and spiritual realms), drawing from my lived experiences.

Phantasms of the Blue Sky is a body of work that builds a network of advocacy, tenderness, and cultural visibility for omitted narratives around layered migration stories. The work is an exploration of multidimensional narratives that illuminate the act of journeying, whether diasporic, introspective, or speculative as a shared human experience. By drawing from my lived experience as a first-generation immigrant with roots in India and a syncretic, third-culture upbringing in Oman and America, the series navigates personal, collective and ancestral memory through ritual, photography and fiction, transmuting grief, longing, and alienation into a space for healing, restoration, and re-enchantment.

The layered compositions invite viewers to contemplate connections between seemingly disparate stories; shaped by migrations of the body, spirit, and into hyperreal speculative realms. These collaged tableaux and altars act as conduits for ancestral links and folk imaginaries, weaving together fragmented narratives into a lurid tapestry. The universalist threads resist the exclusionary logics of nativism and xenophobia, which seek to otherize and demonize those displaced by colonial conquest, economic instability, and ecological collapse.

With an accompanying flash fiction piece centered around a first generation immigrant's plight and magical realism, the work counters the alienation imposed by hierarchical and extractive systems by creating portals to interconnected worlds where individual and collective struggles are honored as part of a shared continuum and suffused with tales with remnants of spectral forces in domestic settings and within landscapes. The series becomes an act of reclamation; an acknowledgment that the boundaries imposed by social stratification, borderization, and geopolitical divides are constructs that can be imaginatively and spiritually dismantled. Within it, forces bind together histories, geographies, and futures with a vision of healing, unlearning and reminders that another world is possible.

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Excerpts from the corresponding fiction (written to supplement this body of work):

"Sun Ra There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)” were the words emblazoned across her sweatshirt. In a Century Gothic typeface, the words were silkscreened with scarlet and magenta inks on top of a hypnotic cluster of sacred Egyptian symbols. The ankh, the eye of Ra (Udjat eye), the regal Horus falcon, the winged sun, the shen ring––all appeared in a jumbled procession on the surface of the fabric, receding and protruding through the inks."

"Isha sat three rows behind the stranger, in the grips of a bleary eyed hypnagogic journey as the bus whizzed past busy intersections and thoroughfares of the city, although at this hour, they were only beginning to take their nascent shapes.....she managed to leave behind her bottle of naproxen and her headphones, vital auxiliaries that kept her satiated and alert on her long haul commutes. Today, there was to be no Geeta Dutt, no Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, no Mohammad Rafi. On most other days, the muffled audio from her wired headphones softly serenaded other weary passengers with qawalis and nostalgic erstwhile Bollywood hits. Only six more minutes had passed since she last checked the time as the bus braked suddenly, letting out a Banshee’s screech which accompanied a violent halt..."

"The visibility continued its slow descent as fog began creeping in from the sea. As she soldiered on in her mission to the corner shop, the fog became a blinding gessoed surface, primed for the projection of latent anxieties, grief, malaise and melancholia. Memories of her deceased husband and parents, her avoidant son, the aloof neighbor, the exacting night shifts and her callous and patronizing manager became a rolodex to cycle through, each one entangled with another."