Identity Crises
Identity Crisis sits at the centre of my practice because identity itself sits at the centre of human struggle — inherited before we understand it, performed before we question it, and defended before we know if it is truly ours.
Identity Crisis is one of my closest and most ongoing projects. In many ways, it is an umbrella under which most of my other works can sit, because almost everything I make keeps returning to the same question: who are we before the world starts naming us?
Humans are constantly in a tryst with identity — imposed, inherited, selected, performed. We are born into identities we do not choose: religion, nationality, geography, caste, class, gender, social hierarchy, and the time in history we arrive into. Yet, strangely, we spend our whole lives defending many of these identities as if we consciously created them.
Alongside these inherited identities, we also keep trying to build chosen ones — professional identities, artistic identities, personal identities, social identities. These identities demand proof. They demand validation. They demand performance
This work began with an aluminium cage I made and entered during a Dada Ball performance at the Royal College of Art. I walked inside the cage wearing a placard that read: I WILL NOT PERFORM.
The irony was that I was still performing.
That contradiction became central to the project. In order to prove our identity, we are constantly performing — performing intelligence, success, grief, confidence, belonging, rebellion, even non-performance. The work asks: Who are we performing for? Why are we performing? And why does existence itself begin to feel like something that constantly needs to be proved?
For me, the cage is both protection and prison. The placard is both resistance and confession. The body inside becomes a site of negotiation between refusal and participation.
Identity Crisis is not a finished project. It is a lifelong enquiry. I feel I will keep working with it in different forms — installation, performance, moving image, writing, and objects — because as long as we are alive, we never fully get rid of identity. We carry it, resist it, perform it, inherit it, break it, and rebuild it again.
