Rai is a visual artist based in Goa. In her practice, found materials, research, memory and fiction interweave to explore themes of spatial permeability. Rai holds a Master of Design in Animation Film Design from the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art History from Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan India. Her work has been presented at Experimenter, Kolkata; Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa; HH Artspaces, Goa; Gallery Espace, New Delhi; VIS Nordic Journal of Artistic Research; Salzburg Summer Akademie, Austria; Hochschule Luzern, Switzerland; and the Sandberg Design Institute, Netherlands, among others. She has received support from institutions including Delfina Foundation, Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, India Foundation for the Arts, the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, Goa Open Arts, Shared Ecologies, and the Museum of Art & Photography in Bangalore.

Residency Project

I responded to my time at the residency through three thematic directions, each connected to ongoing threads within my practice and currently developing as works in progress.

The Slippery Slope
 (Painting and installation)

A slope is a stage in decline. A tent or shelter. A slide. A slant. A movement and a fall. A slow burn full of risks and possibilities. A ramp. A time form. A cinema. Slope is the estuary.

I explored making small maquettes for a series of painting-installation structures that I had been thinking through and planning. I experimented with construction using different types of fabric and canvas, stitching pieces together and dyeing them. I also made several drawings imagining the forms these structures could take. Alongside this, I examined impressions and textures around the Kalba Ice Factory that could go on them through graphite rubbing drawings of found surfaces marked by deposits and organic growth.

The Slippery Slope is a spatial installation that unfolds as both structure and event. It takes the form of a gently inclined environment that visitors can enter, move across, rest within or activate over time. The work continues my interest in building atmospheres where visitors reveal hidden layers through presence, movement and duration. Here, the incline becomes a shifting ground—part painting, part shelter, part screening surface— where subtle changes in light, material and body create evolving encounters.

Reading Al Dizil in Kalba
 (Moving image)

I created a short film based on my experience of finding and reading Al Dizil in Kalba. I became interested in it because of the surreal world of metaphors it creates and its relationship to water, gender, modernisation and oil.

Sylhet in Kalba
 (Research)

During my residency, I explored the lives and work of Sylheti fishworkers from Bangladesh and their community in Kalba. This project connects to my larger research interest in Sylheti communities in coastal regions around the world. I met people, took photographs and conducted a few interviews.