Interdisciplinary artist Indrani Ashe ইন্দ্রাণী responds to a world in which transnational histories and hybrid identities have been strategically marginalized and erased, where profit-based algorithms continue the work of colonialism and imperialism, and perception becomes reality. Wresting the narrative from these hegemonical structures, she creates necessary mythologies at the interplay between image, text, and performance: an intersectional feminist shadow archive which regenerates a damaged past and creates potential realities for the future. Ashe was born in North Carolina in the United States, to an Indian mother whose parents fled the state of Bengal after the violent political upheaval of partition, and a father descended from Welsh-English settlers of the Appalachian Mountains. At the age of two Indrani was separated from her mother due to the staunchly held religious beliefs of her father’s family, the racist American court system, and a total lack of support from the toxic patriarchal order of her mother’s family. Ashe’s mythologies operate to recover an identity that has been erased and displaced by racism, misogyny, and the intergenerational traumas of colonialism and migration. While speaking to the experience of the body as a political vessel her practice employs collective story telling as the ultimate strategy for survival, rebellion, and futurity.
