Mapping Obscura: Locating the Space and Non-Space of Memory and Home through the Photograph

Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently an analyst-in-training at the C.G. Jung Institute, New York. Nayar’s work is represented by Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco and Thomas Erben, New York. Nayar has shown her work internationally at venues including the Museum of Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Freud Museum London, Rencontres d’Arles, 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, and Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, India. Public collections include Solomon Guggenheim Museum NY, Kiran Nadar Museum, Saatchi Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, Cincinnati Art Museum, Hiscox and US Arts in Embassies, JP Morgan Chase. Publications include: 20th Century Indian Art, Modern, Post-Independence, Contemporary, editors Partha Mitter, Parul Dave Mukherji, Rakhee Balaram (Thames and Hudson, 2022); Global Photography: A Critical History, editors Heather Diack, Erina Duganne, Terri Weissman (Routledge, 2020); 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). Nayar’s work has been featured in The New York Times, New Yorker, Art India, Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, Art Papers, 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 has received the Lightborne Fellowship, Aaron Siskind Scholarship, an Art Matters Foundation grant. Nayar holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Nayar’s work intersects photography, sculpture and varied forms of architecture to interrogate our relationship to the built world and thus, ourselves. In her studio-based practice, the photograph is the remaining object of an invested process of making, building, deconstructing and forming new roads to the built environment. In this way, how we remember is central, hand in hand with how we make meaning.