Aishwarya Arumbakkam
Chennai
Aishwarya Arumbakkam (b. 1988) is a visual artist from Chennai, India who works across photography, filmmaking, and drawing. She was honored as one of the ‘Ones to Watch’ by the British Journal of Photography in 2019. In 2020, Arumbakkam was awarded the Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at Testsite, Austin (2023); The South London Gallery (2022); The Visual Arts Center, Austin (2022, 2020); and Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (2021).
Like rainclouds moving between branches of lightning
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When I was young, my mother told me about a list of things you don't tire of looking at. Hair is one of those for me. I photograph hair to look at it. I derive great pleasure in visually consuming its texture, movement, mood, and physicality.
I grew up hearing stories, songs, and stereotypes about a woman’s hair. It was considered a marker of beauty, and character. Hair is something we are born with but it's wielded as a tool to build, and impose identity.
An image evoked by a verse in a Tamil Cankam poem (Kapilar, Kalittokai 55) made me start photographing the way I do. In that sense, these images are about hair but also about landscape, and poetry, tied to Tamil Nadu.
This work began in 2018 as a commission for Soup magazine with creative director Meera Ganapathi on the “vast and varied language of Indian Hair.”
