About

Vandana is a multidisciplinary artist working across live performance, video, installation, photography, and mixed-media sculpture. Born in Haryana, India, she holds an MFA in Fine Art from Kingston University, London, and a Diploma in Fine Arts from Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Arts & Craft, Mumbai. 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.