Aishwarya Arumbakkam

Aishwarya Arumbakkam (b. 1988) is a multidisciplinary visual artist who works across photography, filmmaking, and drawing. An artist from Chennai, India she graduated with an MFA in Studio Art from The University of Texas, Austin. She studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and at Pathshala, Dhaka. Arumbakkam was honored as one of the ‘Ones to Watch’ by the British Journal of Photography in 2019. In 2020, she was awarded the Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at Testsite, Austin (2023); The South London Gallery (2022); The Visual Arts Center, Austin (2022, 2020); and Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (2021).

In Aishwarya Arumbakkam’s practice, photography shapes her connection to the physical world, tethering her to things that worry and excite her, that she longs for, and wants to hold on to. In Ten sounds I cannot hear, she uses photography, video, printmaking, and drawing to build and maintain a close connection with her parents across continents, in the United States and India. Using repeatedly mediated imagery, Arumbakkam shows a complex view of immigration where she and her loved ones are faced with the obstacle of separation while trying to preserve a sense of closeness. The title of the series is inspired by a folder in her archive of photographic and audio material, recorded with her parents over a screen, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the process of making digital time into physical objects, Arumbakkam attempts to shrink the distance that separates her from her ageing mother and father, and lengthen the time she has left with them.