a kitchen in the corner

My work explores how patriarchy sustains itself through repetition, familiarity, and circulation across generations, embedded in family, language, practices & rituals, gestures, and everyday encounters normalising constructed identity & gender roles.

From childhood, we as individuals are introduced to the systems of belief, behaviour, and expectation. They appear natural, but are carefully structured through recitation and repetition within our family, language, ritual, education, and everyday interaction leading to formation of what society understands as gender.

This enquiry with self has stuck with me since I was a kid. Drawing from personal experiences, living with a set of people in a society, I saw my identity being constantly constructed and shaped into one that fits perfectly in the set. While there were moments when I tried to break through the idea of what ‘I should be doing as a girl, as a daughter & as a sister’, yet I found it difficult to have my own voice within the complex system I was living in. In the early years of my life I didn’t know what exactly this system was called but I surely knew I was a part of some kind of social framework. I remember sitting with my mother & my grandmother revisiting old memories by looking at photo albums of my childhood, wedding albums of my parents and my grandparents. Little did I know that these photographs too were shaping my thinking and the way how I identified myself. As I was growing older, I began to observe & read more, I further kept questioning these systems while I got introduced to the term ‘Patriarchy’.

Emerging from my own lived experience within the Indian subcontinent, my work explores how patriarchal structures become embedded in the familiar, passed down through generations and sustained through domestic rituals, language, spaces, and images. Gendered boundaries are maintained not merely through force, but through familiarity, repetition, and inheritance. Within this framework, identity becomes relational rather than autonomous, shaped by expectations, sanctioned roles, and structures inherited across generations. I reflect upon how patriarchy persists through the seemingly ordinary gestures, rituals, and modes of being through which it is internalised, reproduced, and normalised within these sociocultural structures.

I use kitchen lithography as a method and metaphor where the act of transfer from the plate to the prints echoes the transmission of inherited structures across generations. Through re-appropriation of my family archives, self-portraiture, and documents, I trace the quiet reproduction and circulation of these structures within my own lineage in the different phases of life. The aluminium foil image transfer plates act as sites of inscription, holding reversed and unstable impressions of gestures and language. The plates place the patriarchal system as an embedded material often unnoticed in their operation. By bringing these plates into visibility, my work attempts to expose these underlying structures of reproduction. As images move from plate to print, they enter cycles of repetition and circulation in the family archives, gradually becoming normalised further reflecting upon how conditioned behaviours and roles shape what is perceived as identity. It intends to question generational inheritance as to how memory is constructed and how documentation participates in sustaining these systems.

The identity thus becomes relational rather than autonomous. I create composite faces by merging portraits of myself, my mother, and my grandmother, bringing three generations into shared, anonymous identities. These faces hold traces of individual identities while suggesting how they are shaped, negotiated, and sometimes obscured by the roles and expectations they inherit. I place these faces within the corners of a kitchen, a contained space where gendered behaviours, gestures, and expectations are learned, repeated, and normalised.

Against the visual dominance of these kitchen plates, the passport-sized composite faces recede in between, evoking the erasure of individual identities within these structures. Yet their direct gazes confront the system, asserting a presence that resists their complete subsumption. The tension between visibility and erasure becomes complex as these quietly operating systems are brought into view through the plates while the identities they shape risk being obscured by them, yet the gaze interrupts this intended erasure, refusing to let the identities remain merely anonymous or passive within the structures they inherit.

• Kitchen Lithography Image Transfers on Aluminium Foil Plates (8.27” x 11.69” each)

• Composite Faces (myself, mother & grandmother) , Kitchen Lithography Prints (scaled, 2" x 1.5" each)