Yamini Nayar’s (US/India) work intersects photography, sculpture and the language of architecture to foreground questions about the built environment and its psychological and social dimensions. In her studio-based practice, photographs are documents made from mixed media assemblages and installations, in which the photograph is the only trace of an invested process of physical construction. Temporality, materiality and performance are central to her work, as is the hand.
Her recent projects have explored memory, migration, informal architecture and dwellings, modernist architecture, and alternate & imagined modernities.
Nayar holds an MFA from School of Visual Arts, NY and BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Museum of Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Studio Museum of Harlem, Kiran Nadar Museum, Decordova Museum and Saatchi Museum. Publications include Chandigarh is in India, editor Shanay Jhaveri; Lines of Control, Partition as a Productive Space editors Hammed Nasar and Iftikhar Dadi; Unfixed: Postcolonial Photography in Contemporary Art, editors Sara Blokland and Asmara Pelupessy; and Manual for Treason, Sharjah Biennial, editor Murtaza Vali. Her works are in many public and private collections including the Guggenheim Museum, Saatchi Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum, Queens Museum, Kiran Nadar Museum and US Arts in Embassies. Nayar teaches photography at John Jay College in New York and is represented by Thomas Erben, New York and Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai.
