Gavati Wad and Nehal Vyas
Artist-in-Residence
May 1 – 14, 2023

Gavati Wad is an artist from Pune, India. She is interested in questions of identity in contexts such as gender, the domestic environment and the nation-state. She primarily works with performance and self-portraiture on 16mm film, responding to tropes and standards present in commercial media practices, including those of the photo studio, television broadcasting, and political propaganda. Gavati is the co-founder of Artists in Revolution Collective (AIRC), dedicated to programming art and cinema from underrepresented communities across the world. She graduated from California Institute of the Arts with an MFA in Film/Video in 2022. Gavati is currently based in Los Angeles, California

Nehal Vyas is a film and video artist from India, currently based in Los Angeles. Her work explores the idea of national identity through memory, personal history and inheritance. She is a recent graduate from California Institute of the Arts where she received her MFA in Film/Video.

She is a recipient of the Flaherty Fellowship (2022), the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Scholarship and the Lillian Disney Scholarship. Her works have shown at Camden International Film Festival, REDCAT (Los Angeles), 2220 Arts + Archive (Los Angeles), Automata (Los Angeles), Analogica (Italy) and Mumbai International Film Festival (India).

Together with her friend and artist, Gavati Wad, she runs the Artists in Revolution Collective, which focuses on developing a nuanced understanding of socio-political conditions across the globe through screenings and discussions in collaboration with fellow artists and filmmakers.

For their residency, Gavati and Nehal invited 4 other artists  to join them in creating Not At Home, a cross-disciplinary collaborative installation.

Not At Home 

A Cross-Disciplinary Collaborative Exhibition
Of Drawing, Sculpture, and Moving Image Installation
Presented at Automata May 26-28, 2023

Not At Home: Working within the boundaries set by the blueprint of a house—a garden, kitchen, living room, dining room, and a bedroom— six artists of various nationalities respond to the notions of exile, disappearance, censorship and surveillance in a multi-media installation within this constructed home. Each artist draws from their own socio-political conditions, memories, hopes and desires to create a tactile reimagination of a place we belong to.