ARTIST STATEMENT
The internal impetus to mutate my personal archive led me to imagine a world that is yet to be and to collaborate with Physarum polycephalum, also known as slime mold, an acellular organism that holds the interest of the scientific community due to its ability to think and perform complex computations without a brain or a nervous system. Through this, I seek to expand my personal matrilineal archive into an evolving organism that blurs the boundaries between human and non-human intelligence. The work unfolds as a form of performance as an extraterrestrial and ‘living photographs’ that changes daily, reflecting processes of growth, decay and reproduction. Rooted in eco-feminist theory, I investigate how labor, particularly women’s and non-human labor, is exploited or obscured within capitalist systems.
I extend this concern to consider how female identity is both biologically and culturally constrained. Just as modern agriculture pressures plants to flower and bear fruit at an unnatural pace, the female body is often caught between competing ideals of freedom, productivity, and control. This tension reflects broader systems in which labor – emotional, reproductive, creative, is monitored, quantified, and commodified. I am interested in the limits of self-authorship in an age of boundless data, and in how we might cultivate alternative modes of care, growth, and resilience. The process of growing slime mold has also extended my role to that of a caregiver of a living photograph.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kanishka is an NYC-based conceptual artist and writer who explores interspecies collaboration and ecological entanglement as ways to reimagine archives, kinship, and knowledge. By proposing radical solidarities with her ecological allies and asserting the position of women as innovators, everyday rebels and aliens, she aims to establish a flat ontology in her proposed world. She completed her MFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design in 2025. She received the Student Research Travel award to investigate the rising Island Feminism in Hawaii. Her works were a part of Correspondence, at Baxter St, New York , Transcending Perspectives at Photoville, New York, Lishui Photography Festival in China, and Jaipur Arts Week in India. Her work was recently showcased in a public exhibit at Elizabeth Street Garden in New York. Her essays have been published in Back Matter Magazine, Rukhmabai Initiatives, an Exhibition Catalog, Columbia Journal (2026). Kanishka has shared her research through artist talks at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Paris. She will speak about her upcoming research at the national photography conference organised by Society of Photographic Education in Atlanta in March 2026. When not writing or making or talking to her mother, she is taking care of her slime molds.
© Kanishka