Payal Arya
Payal Arya
Payal Arya's works are an almost invasive reverie; the subtle balance between nature's invasiveness and mankind's imprint. This paradox is celebrated in the juxtaposition of her exploration of mycelium's memory transfer and the electrical impulse of the digital noise, creating a terrain where the organic and the anthropogenic entwine. Each entity thrives on the other in an attempt to regain its identity, highlighting negotiation and the resilience of the physical membrane of the being.
The artworks make tangible the otherwise invisible shift within the environment. This shift is experienced through reverberations of violence and its slippages, from the outside and within the corporeal. The need to address the body comes from being diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, where the body is fighting itself to protect itself. The other in this context, refers to the body not recognizing a part of it as its own.
According to Marshall McLuhan, “Violence is a response to the lack of identity, and constitutes an attempt to regain identity.” The subtext of violence runs through most of her practice, where the relation with violence has been of finding spaces from where she could "watch violence from a distance" to exemplify, the window, the television monitor, the screen become sites of mediation. Through the series of engulfing installations, the viewer encounters moments of volatility which would force them to bear witness and reject.