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‘…how will I ever know if I have reached the horizon? There will always be a horizon waiting.’ 11 10 ’15 (diary notes)


Time and memory have been the primary points of inquiry in sonam’s practice where she explores alternate temporalities (experiential/ lived/ incoherent time) that resist its linear constructs (definite/ artificial/ coherent time). Memory is an essential means to understand time since past moments eternalise by fixing onto memory and traveling through time into the unforeseeable future- memory serves as an internal and individual mode to time-travel.

She is also interested in understanding what role time plays in the current economic structure predominantly dependent on converting each hour into production time while capitalizing on attention-time. The feverish urge of the present world to drift into the rabbit hole of screens constantly craving for our attention, has made her realise how slowness, rest, hibernation, solitude, day-dreaming and a horizontal living are forms of resistance; how niches for respite can only be built from and within the capitalist machinery itself.

Her artistic research into time and memory materialises through installations, interactive art, found objects, artist’s books + ephemeral mediums like sound, automated-calling systems, instruction-based art and creating associative and conversational practices around gathering and sharing, among others.


‘We live in an age where we are cultivating our sense of time and memory through pixels– Pixel memory/time– memory derived from the digital space that is incoherent, quickly consumed and forgotten, hyperdocumented and performative, along side a sense of time that is alienating, disorienting, and like an inescapable and magnetic rabbit-hole. The magical pixels seduce us with a new trick every moment’ 17 12 ’21 (diary notes)

Time and memory merge into each other; they are like the two sides of a medal. It is obvious enough that without Time, memory cannot exist either. But memory is something so complex that no list of all its attributes could define the totality of the impressions through which it affects us. Memory is a spiritual concept. For instance, if somebody tells us of his impressions of childhood, we can say with certainty that we shall have enough material in our hands to form a complete picture of that person. Bereft of memory, a person becomes the prisoner of an illusory existence; falling out of time he is unable to seize his own link with the outside world- in other words he is doomed to madness. As a moral being, man is endowed with memory which sows in him a sense of dissatisfaction. It makes us vulnerable, subject to pain. Andrei Tarkovsky (From Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, pg 57-58)

The technologies and schemas that businesses and governments capitalise through, are employed in her works– attempted by converting time into a currency in her recent project, KAIROI (2019-’20), a time-sensitive vending machine. Similarly, it’s seen in her collaborative project -out-of-line-, that uses the disruptive and ubiquitous communication technologies of automated-calling & messaging systems to transmit sound/text works over cables and signals. How does one navigate and transgress through the technologies that permeate our present pace of living (/striving) towards constant continuities & connectivities?


sonam has her BFA from Faculty of Fine Arts– M.S. University, Baroda and MFA from Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida. She has initiated collaborative art projects like first draft and –out-of-line–, received the FICA Public Art Grant for –out-of-line– and Five Million Incidents grant for KAIROI; she was Artreach India’s third teaching fellow in 2017. She has participated in exhibitions at Max Mueller Bhavan, FICA, India International Centre, IGNCA, Bikaner House and Mumbai Art Room, among others and was an artist-in-residence at What About Art? (Mumbai), Utsha Foundation for Contemporary Art (Bhubaneswar), O.P. Jindal Global University (Sonipat) and Kammari Residency (Treis Elies, Cyprus). Her writings have been published at BMJ Global, Hakara Journal and others. She is also the founding member of the NGO- Jeevan Stambh Foundation started in 2020, and Artreach India’s Apprenticeships, Internships and Mentorships (AIM) manager.