Rai
(Amrita Barua, b.1993)
Lives and works between Goa and West Bengal, India.
Rai is a visual artist working across image-making, fiction and installation. Her work is interested in fluidity, movement and mobility, and the ways we negotiate our relationships to places, materials and one another.
Her work frequently engages with estuaries—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 complicate 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. Drawing from research, memory, and things encountered or collected along the way, her works often take the form of fragmented narratives, spaces and situations, reflecting on the malleability of recollection. Thresholds recur in her work as forms and as spaces. Fiction becomes a way of bringing these fragments into relation with one another.
Her work has been shown at Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), Bangalore, Experimenter, Kolkata; Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa; HH Artspaces, Goa; Gallery Espace, New Delhi; KNMA, 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.
2026 Inheritors of Earth, as part of Shared Ecologies, KNMA, Delhi
2026 Pressure systems, Modern Art Gallery, Delhi
2026 Cumulus, Citron, Goa
2026 Form Flux Film: Evolving Practices in Contemporary moving image, Arthshila, Delhi
2026 Beneath the Turning Sky, Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), Bangaluru, India
2025 A black dot moving in the green, open studio, Delfina Foundation, London
2025 Fever, solo presentation, Artists for Artists, Experimenter Kolkata
2024 Archive of potential (Goan) Futures, Goa Familia, Serendipity Arts Festival
2024 Search Party, solo presentation, part of Multiplay, Serendipity Arts Festival
2024 Feral Ecologies, HH Artspaces, Goa
2024 Are you my sister, Sister Library and Lovebirds Studio, Mumbai
2024 Court Painter's outing, Gallery Espace, New Delhi
2024 Open studio, Salzburg Summer Akademi
2024 Excerpts from Ngan and Nilnil, Goa Open Arts Festival
2023 999 Edition II, House 999, Goa
2023 Biom, New Delhi
2023 Zero to Hundred, HH Artspaces, Goa
2023 Finding home: At the nexus of ecological grief, artistic research and environmental justice, Hochschule Luzern – Design & Kunst, Switzerland
2022 999 Edition I, House 999, Goa
2022 How I traveled in time and became the richest person on the planet - short film curated by The One Minutes and Sandberg Design Institute for 'Snack or Food Pill' - Sixty second science fiction
2021 Boundaries, Group Show, an exhibition by recipients of the Goa Open Arts Catalyst grant
2021 Surface Encounters and Strange Beings, HH Art Spaces, Goa
2020 Pulse - exhibit, Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Booth, India Art Fair
2020 Plam Town - installation, Goa Open Arts Festival, Goa
2022-23 Arts Practice, India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), Bangaluru
2021-22 Goa Open Arts CATALYST Grant, Goa
2021 FICA Emerging Artist Award, FICA extended platform, New Delhi and Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation
2026 sqW:Lab Fellowship, Mumbai, IN (upcoming)
2026 Flower Tools, QRAVE and Ableton, Goa, IN
2026 Sharjah Art Foundation Residency, Kalba, UAE
2025 Delfina Foundation, London, UK
2024 Salzburg Summer Akademi, Austria
2023 Biom, Shared Ecologies and Maze Collective Studio, New Delhi, IN
2021 Inlaks online residency, Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, IN
2020 Cona - Inbetweeners, online, IN
2018 Kochi Biennale - Non-fiction graphic narratives, Kochi, IN
2020 MDes in Animation Film Design, National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India.
2016 BFA in Art History, Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, India.
The Donkey Rider, Penguin books (Forthcoming), 2026
Altodi Poltodi, VIS #9 – Theme: Of Memory and Public Space, VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, 2023
Longform 2022: A Collection of Graphic Stories, Penguin India, 2022
Documentation of visual culture, Visiting Faculty, National Institute of Design Haryana, 2023.
Environmental graphic design, Visiting Faculty, National Institute of Design Haryana, 2023.
Graphic narratives for scientific research, Guest Lecturer, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, 2022.
Saturday Community Program sessions, The Learning Centre, Moira, January - April, 2024.