Par Nair (she/her) is an Indian born interdisciplinary artist and educator who lives and makes in the GTA (Canada). Her practice which centers oil paintings, hand embroidery, installation, and creative writing focus on dual identities, hybrid cultures and fragmented realities of migrants. Par acquired her Master’s (MFA) in Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design from OCAD University and has shown her works nationally and internationally. Notable showings include Nuit Blanche, Eastern Edge Gallery, Xpace Cultural Centre, Mayten’s Gallery, Project Casa,The Textile Museum of Canada, Riverdale Art Gallery, Propeller Art Gallery and The Kochi Biennale (India). Par’s work celebrates the often invisible, misrepresented, and stereotyped voices and stories of Indian women. Par currently teaches drawing at OCAD University.

 NEWS: linktr.ee/parnairr


Email : parvnair969@gmail.com

Instagram: @parnairr


Artist Statement

I investigate and explore melancholia in diaspora using decolonial methods and a return to ancestral knowledge and practices. Through objects and memories that are both intimate and estranged, I wish to consider the effects of assimilation and fragmentation that migrant experiences hold. Using interdisciplinary artistic practices that center performative film, oil paintings, installations, embroidery, digital collage, poetry and short stories, my work is a play on expectations and translations of racialized and migrant bodies. I aim to empower racialized bodies through ritual while celebrating symbols of beauty like the brown skin and the black braid that have been undermined by colonialism, wielding ancestral knowledges as a way of offering, of healing, and of sharing. I wish to celebrate the differences in media and interdisciplinarity to “disrupt” the white cube rhetoric through decoration while evoking a sense of feeling “at home” to honour the mother, the motherland, the mother tongue and rituals lost to the onslaught of overwhelming eurocentrism and patriarchal colonialism. 


This work that I do is for other brown bodies like mine who may have felt lost in their journeys of crossing borders. Weaving and sharing stories that acknowledge our wholeness and our traumas may lead us in a direction where we might someday feel more whole in our sometimes exhaustive, stories of home-loss.

Key words: diasporic melancholia, hybridity, archive, mother, decolonial, home

Thanks to Ontario Arts Council for generously supporting my practice

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