Rai works across image-making and installation, using inks, dyes, found objects, and media, allowing materials to shape the process through a frugal approach to making. Interweaving research, memory, and fiction, her practice engages estuaries, coastlines, and wetlands – places where ecological processes intersect with histories of trade, migration, and colonialism. Themes of fluidity and spatial negotiation run through her work.
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 the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), Bangalore.