Hello! My name is Supermrin. I am an Indian artist working at the intersections of architecture, sculpture, and landscape. I live and work between India and the United States. I create site-specific installations and interventions, drawings, sculptures and land works.
My artistic practice responds to the hegemonic histories of urban development projects within contemporary cities. I believe that urban landscapes are gendered and fragmented spaces that deny the complexities of inner life and human emotion. Through research-based, speculative, and site specific propositions, I construct space as a living host and an embodied nurturance, one that is experienced both as interiority and as infrastructure. I am interested in conceptions of reality, pleasure, and nature, within eastern practices.
Explore my studio research here.
How did my practice develop?
My early introductions to art were when I was two years old - my mother moved from Delhi to Paris to complete a PhD in African postcolonial literature at the Sorbonne. I grew up visiting the library at the Centre Pompidou every day with her as she worked, and was quickly immersed in the wonderful and strange exhibits that I encountered on the gallery floors above. I remember seeing a detailed exhibition on feces spotted in the streets of Paris, and as you can imagine, it made a perfect impression on my childish mind. We returned to India when I was 8. Looking from the heavily guarded exhibits inside the National Museum to the vacant streets below, I questioned the relevance of contemporary art here. In a country fraught with social, economic and political strife, that prioritized stark infrastructure development projects, and a Brutalist modern architecture, what was art’s place? Years later, I understood that power. As artists and citizens, we choose the critical mission for the re-imagination of our borders, territories and social relationships.
As a young adult, I sought to impact public space - the metaphorical waste on the streets of Delhi - through my own practice in architecture and design. I received an undergraduate degree in Exhibition and Spatial Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India, and thereafter spent 8 years practicing alongside my mentor, Suparna Bhalla, principle of Abaxial Architects, producing numerous projects at a variety of scales. I believe that shared spaces are rare, precious resources, significant in their ability to nurture, humanize and protect.
In 2012, I was awarded a yearlong fellowship to travel across the Indian subcontinent, engaging with the diverse local and regional forms of architecture and landscape outside of India’s big urban centers. I developed a deep love for the peoples, spaces, and sites I encountered through this journey. This fellowship was a turning point in my career, and ultimately empowered me to develop Streetlight, a critical spatial laboratory investigating site and space. During this period I moved from Delhi to San Francisco, and received an MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017.
Today my artistic research is situated within this re-imagining of space and experience. I understand space as a physical-perceptual material that mediates all human-animal relationships. Through radical re-conceptions of scale, volume, form, color, light, sound, time, matter and movement, I create site-specific installations and environments that seek to shift perceptions, beliefs and assumptions about the nature of the physical world. I utilize deep research to re-imagine historical narrative through the poetics of lived everyday experience.
In 2019 I was awarded the ‘Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design’ (AICAD) Teaching Fellowship at Pratt Institute, New York, and taught within the Drawing and Sculpture Areas in the Fine Arts Department, in the School of Art. I am presently an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at DAAP, University of Cincinnati, and have continued my engagement with Pratt as a Visiting Artist in the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) Program.
Here is a short bio:
Supermrin is an Indian artist working at the intersections of architecture, art, and design. Through a research-led, speculative, and site-specific practice, she creates installations and environments that seek to reconsider the values that spaces offer, and the ways through which they mediate human relationships. She is interested in conceptions of reality, pleasure, and nature within eastern practices. Her current body of works, Untitled, Amazon Grocery Bags, 2020 have been a response to the pandemic and a way to re-discover “sites” within the confines of her studio apartment in Brooklyn.
Supermrin is a Visiting Artist at the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) Program at Pratt Institute, and an Assistant Professor of Art at the School of Art, University of Cincinnati. She holds an MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, California and an undergraduate degree in Exhibition Design from the National Institute of Design, India. Her work has been exhibited at venues across the United States and Asia, including the Venice Biennale for Architecture 2021, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Old San Francisco Mint Building, Root Division, The First Presbyterian Church of New York, ChaShaMa, and the India Habitat Center in New Delhi. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance (2021), the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design Fellowship (2018-20), the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program (2019), and the Graduate Fellowship Residency Award at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2017). She has served as a juror for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Grants, the Scholastic Awards, and has been awarded the Creative Capital "On our Radar'' distinction for 2021. Supermrin founded Streetlight in 2015 as a critical spatial research and design laboratory for decolonizing public space. She is presently engaged in public arts projects with ProArts Gallery and COMMONS in Oakland and on Governors Island in New York.
Download my CV here.