About

Vandana is a multidisciplinary artist working across live performance, video, installation, photography, and mixed-media sculpture. Born in Haryana, India, she trained at Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Arts in Mumbai before completing her MFA in Fine Art at Kingston University, London. Her work has been presented at Kochi Muziris Biennale 2025-26, Bangkok Art Biennale 2018 (with the Marina Abramović Institute, in a 175-hour durational performance), Daegu Art Fair — Young Artist Project (South Korea), Stiftung Futur residency (Switzerland), and the Jerwood Drawing Prize (London). She lives and works in India.

Practice

My practice begins in silence — the gaps, voids, and internal spaces where the habitual noise of living briefly falls away — and moves outward into the body, its rituals, and the question of who we are beneath the names and roles we carry. For over fifteen years I have worked across performance, video, sculpture, installation, photography, and the artist book, letting each idea find the material and form it demands rather than committing to a single medium.

Through ongoing bodies of work — the Silence series and the Rituals of Self series — I have developed a sustained investigation into the body’s automatic functions: blinking, speaking, breathing, swallowing, the movement of the neck, the habitual greeting of strangers. I isolate each function, intensify it, and hold it open until the shift of power between the body and the Self becomes visible. I do not script my performances. I set a frame — a beginning, an idea, a condition — and surrender to what unfolds within it. This interplay of control and surrender runs through my entire practice: in performance, it is the tension between the structure I hold and the unknown I enter; in material work, it is the gap between intention and what the material actually does — a brick cast in alcohol that changes colour and smell over weeks as if the material itself is alive, plaster that remains incomplete on the walls of a shed, soot that collects slowly on clay.

Performance is my primary medium because it is live, direct, and has the power to hold both the artist and the audience in a sustained present — a space where the surface of automatic living can be ruptured and something real and truthful can be touched, even if briefly. That power comes from its directness: the body places the work only once removed from reality, a transmission between artist and audience with no intervening channel, creating a space for genuine encounter and energy exchange. Whether I am building four walls around myself in a basement searching for silence, asking a stranger “Who are you?” until neither of us can answer, or sitting untitled at a piano while my hair is being cut, I am creating the conditions under which programmed perception can break — and something of our own condition can be met. The work does not seek spectacle. It seeks a wakeful encounter.