Rai is a visual artist from India, working across image-making, fiction and installation, often exploring themes of spatial negotiation, fluidity, movement and mobility.

Her work frequently revolves around estuaries, wetlands and coastlines—places where ecological processes intersect with histories of trade and migration. She is drawn to these geographies for their porosity, and for the ways they unsettle fixed ideas of place and identity.

Working with inks, dyes, pigments and found objects, Rai allows materials and their particular qualities to shape her process, through a frugal approach to making. She is interested in what materials carry within them—traces of use, elemental forces, time and transformation—and how these can suggest connections between otherwise distant places and histories.

Drawing from research, memory and things encountered or collected along the way, her works often take the form of fragmented narratives, spaces, situations and atmospheres. Fiction becomes a way of bringing these fragments together, allowing connections between places, objects and histories to surface and possibilities to emerge.

Her work has been shown at Experimenter, Kolkata; Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa; HH Artspaces, Goa; Gallery Espace, New Delhi; and internationally at the Salzburg Summer Akademie, Austria; Hochschule Luzern, Switzerland; and Sandberg Design Institute, Netherlands, among others. Her practice has received support from the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), Goa Open Arts, Shared Ecologies, Delfina Foundation, Sharjah Art Foundation, and Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), Bangalore.