YAMINI NAYAR is an artist working between New York and Delhi. Her works intersect photography, sculpture, and the language of architecture to present questions into the built environment, its social and psychological dimensions, and the body. 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, translation, and depth psychology are central to her work, as is the hand. Her projects have explored postcolonial narratives, memory, migration, informal architecture and dwellings, modernist architecture, and alternate & imagined modernities.

About the Work 

YAMINI NAYAR, US/India, is based in Brooklyn, NY.. Nayar has shown her work internationally at venues including the Museum of Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Freud Museum London, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Queensland Art Gallery in Australia, DeCordova Museum MA, Kiran Nadar Museum New Delhi, Sharjah Biennial in UAE, Saatchi Gallery UK, Studio Museum of Harlem and recently a presentation at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, India. Her work is in many public and private collections including the Solomon Guggenheim Museum NY, Kiran Nadar Museum, Saatchi Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, Cincinnati Art Museum, Hiscox, and US Arts in Embassies, JP Morgan Chase. Her work is published in Global Photography: A Critical History upcoming 2019, editors Heather Diack, Erina Duganne, Terri Weissman; Chandigarh is in India, edited by Shanay Jhaveri (Shoestring Publishers, 2016), Passages: Indian Art Today (Daab Media, 2014), Lines of Control, Partition as a Productive Space (Green Cardamom 2012), Unfixed: Postcolonial Photography in Contemporary Art (Jap Sam Books, 2013); Empire Strikes Back: Contemporary Indian Art Today (Saatchi) and Manual for Treason: Sharjah Biennial edited by Murtaza Vali (2011). She has been featured in New York Times, New Yorker, Art India, Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, Vogue India, Artpapers, and others. Residencies and grants include Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Art Academy of Cincinnati, and NYU Visiting Artist Scholar. Nayar is a recipient of the Lightborne Fellowship, Aaron Siskind Fellowship at SVA, an Art Matters Foundation travel grant (to Chandigarh, India), and nominated for a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship. She has been a visiting artist at many institutions and is a Thesis Advisor in the MFA Photography Dept of the School of Visual Arts. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY where she studied with Sarah Charlesworth, and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, with prior studies in philosophy and psychology at Eugene Lang College, NY.and University of Michigan. Nayar's work is represented by Jhaveri Contemporary Mumbai, Thomas Erben New York, and Gallery Wendi Norris, SF.