Warm Up 2026 Set Design

When we first discussed this outdoor commission for Warm Up at MoMA PS1, you shared references to structures, floats, and architectural-scale draperies for various kinds of summer rituals and temple processions. Is there a particular seasonal festival that you find especially moving, or that was influential while working on this installation?

I wanted to create something that would react to the elements, to light and wind. A form that flutters, and also a dynamic object that is only realized through interaction.

Seasonal festivals bring people together in an inviting and hospitable way. Most Indian festivals are multisensory; visual, sonic, and olfactory all at once. With an ephemeral form like a festival or a procession, you have to address the “living world”; they are not static expressions. Most festivals evolved out of supple human practices: time, material, tradition, memory, and ecstasy.

As I made drawings for PS1, I listened to the amazing folk singer C.J. Kuttappan’s hypnotic song “Malloor Thottam” as well as Prahlad Tipanya’s “Kabir Bhajan.”

Do you have any personal New York City summer rituals?

I hate summer! Specifically, the false pressure to enjoy everything. But one of my favorite activities is to go out to Brighton Beach with a friend to have the Borjomi water with tarragon extract.

You’ve often described your approach to form and composition as a kind of “noisy writing,” which implies both a literary tradition and a sonic effect, but also suggests something more contemporary, like a glitch, error, or malfunction—something going off-script. I also like connecting this idea to graffiti, a different kind of public, unsanctioned “writing” practice. How do you reconcile notation and oration within a visual paradigm?

I love the idea of off-script-edness. I’m really drawn to the visual of the “keyboard smash,” which is so visceral and emotional while still just being a sequence of letters. That’s where the idea of “noisy writing” came from. The insertion of something else within a rigid order.

And I love an encounter with an idea that can only be approached through untranslatability and noise, the same way that music as a genre is never reducible to the content of lyrics but rather the sonic qualities of what we’re hearing, and the speed and tempo we feel in it. Noisy writing also conjures semiotic density or a kind of visual dogpiling. If you were to see all of the files that I’m working on as I draw, there are hundreds and hundreds of layers all stacked together—which the final image never shows.

As someone who studied type design and is literate in more than one alphabet, how do you relate to code as both a directive and an ornamental form? I’m also curious to learn about your connection to ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). Surely you’re too young to have grown up using a command-line interface?

I am so inspired by forms that hold images, script, and ornament together. Meaning comes through arrangement, and you can still perceive the parts from which the sum surfaces. I love when things emerge from noise, or when chaos coalesces into substance; it has a certain kind of interdimensionality. My relationship to older versions of formal and vernacular digital art is more on the basis of this fluid relationship between form and meaning. I really like the ASCII medium, but I don’t hold any nostalgia for it. I find the obscurity or inaccessibility of historical or intermediate forms stimulating.

My personal inclination is that before language was distilled into distinct visual symbolic forms, we used ornamentation to convey a compressed and specific burst of meaning, like what we find in waterfalls or shooting stars. I aspire to the level of how ornaments possess this kind of ultra-dense, profound essence.

For example: ░▒▓█

The syncretism, iconoclasm, and nihilism of the 15th-century mystic Kabir are at the heart of this installation. Can you describe the significance of his poetry and his legacy, and why you’ve chosen to call upon his language, and form, from the spiritual vacuum of the present?

It’s important to state that I made these works in summer 2026, in “Mamdanistan.” I actually think Mamdani’s New York–our New York–is one of resurgent spirituality, where belief and commitment are once again in the air.

Kabir was born to Muslim weavers in Benares, and he sang of a God without form or name. He refused every orthodoxy: temple and mosque, scripture and rite, the labels Hindu and Muslim. He dismissed them all as noise between the seeker and the sought. The only path led inward: invisible, perceived only by those willing to look. His compositions are sung often in India and Pakistan today, many centuries later.

The philosopher Federico Campagna talks about “syncretic” intuition, which I’ll paraphrase as the ability to perceive the invisible analogical links between things and beings. Syncretism rests on a deep assumption, that the whole world is bound together by threads of analogy, a network that holds everything together and makes all language relative, provisional, gelatinous, and playful–pointing past itself rather than fixing meaning in absolutes.

For me, Kabir’s voice unwinds our usual scripts and teaches us to look at the world upside down, and also subtly.

His poetry in the Purabiya boli (पुरबिया बोली) dialect of Hindi is called Ulatbansi (उलटबांसी), upside-down language, where fish climb trees and the ocean catches fire. It seems built to jam ordinary sense so that truth can shine through the breakages. Truth waits behind the veil–the fabric of the world is only a covering thrown over what is eternal.

The title of one of my artworks renders the couplet literally, breaking the name Kabir back into the syllables the poem spells out, then rebuilding them as a body.

कक्का केवल ब्रह्म है, बब्बा बीज शरीर, रर्रा सब घट रम रहा ताका नाम कबीर। Ka is the absolute reality. Ba is the seed body. Ra pervades every being. Together, these three syllables form the name Kabir.

Ka is the background, what stands behind, the mesh beyond everything. Ba is the seed body or the printed form, what literally appears atop the fabric, the print. And Ra, the entire booth, a field of chaos which pervades every being. I wanted to evoke Kabir’s simultaneous immensity and blankness, a paradoxical fullness and emptiness. There is also a physically reflective quality to the work. My drawings—our mere perception of what is seen—vanish in a brilliant flash.

What inspired the sigil-like designs on each pennant?

Kabir describes the eternal experience as unknowable, unseen, and nameless (अगम अलख अनामी). Everything else is just life in motion. Three of the pennants are the three gunas, or fundamental energetic qualities of the universe: sattva, rajas, tamas.

Although these gunas construct reality, Kabir says the real is what stands behind them, untouched. So when light shines on the banners, the retroreflective surface answers, throwing back the hidden image of pure light at whoever has looked—something that has been waiting all along for a beholder to catch a glimpse. Kabir’s God is nirguna—literally nir- (without) + guna. A divine beyond the three strands.

Many electronic musicians are enthusiastically drawn to the intricacy and intimacy of your work, what do you think appeals to them about it?

To be honest, I don’t know exactly what it is! Perhaps the aesthetic of intricate systems and things that break them.