Sejal Parekh is a British-born Indian cross-disciplinary artist working across site-specific installations, video, and sound. Her practice operates at the intersection of materiality and memory, excavating the profound concept of hiraeth, a condition of diasporic longing that transcends mere nostalgia to radically re-understand cultural belonging. She describes her works as "sculptural interventions that map the complex geographies of displacement.” Working through site-specific installations, video and sound, Parekh's art emerges from her lived experience within parallel cultural systems. Her aesthetic approach functions as an archaeology of gesture, transforming historically marginalising objects and motifs into instruments of critical refusal.

Parekh graduated with First Class Honours in Fine Art from Winchester School of Art (2002) and is currently pursuing an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London (2025). Her ongoing body of work investigates notions of home as a conceptual ideal with belonging at its core, examining cross-cultural dynamics and identity formation. Her work has been exhibited internationally including MACBA, SWAB Art Fair, Art Meets Apolo with Galería Senda, FlagLab Barcelona, as well as Ovada Gallery Oxford, Hoxton Gallery and Stone Space Gallery in London.

Earlier this month, I spoke to the artist about her creative practice, the political implications of art-making, and what she means when she describes her practice as "a form of resistance against weaponised narratives.”

Your work navigates themes of assimilation, displacement, and cultural identity. How does your cross-cultural British-Indian identity shape your approach to interrogating these concepts, and what role do you see art playing in challenging or redefining societal perceptions of "otherness"?

There's an inherent tension that comes with existing between worlds, a displacement that becomes both liminal and portal. My identity isn't something I consciously interrogate, but rather the ground from which everything emerges. This fissure creates a particular vantage point, one that allows me to witness how borders are inscribed not just on maps but on bodies and memories. My sculptural and installation practice works with this tension, creating spaces where multiple temporalities and histories converge. The material presence of the work offers a direct encounter that doesn't require translation or explanation. I'm tired of the demand on artists to present solutions or corrections to societal issues.

This destabilisation allows for moments of recognition beyond prescribed narratives of identity. The power lies not in answering questions about otherness, but in creating conditions where such questions become visible in their insufficiency.

You often centre mundane everyday objects like safety pins, spoons, or certain food items, which carry fraught histories of inequality, in your practice. How do you select these materials, and what process transforms them into tools of resistance or reclamation in your installations?

Objects hold testimony — they bear witness to often erased histories. I'm drawn to materials that exist at thresholds between utility and symbolism, between the intimate and institutional. These selections begin with resonance, with memories that manifest first as sensation and that connect to ancestral gestures. The objects I work with already contain their own resistance; my practice simply amplifies what's already there, bringing forward the invisible currents of meaning and memory they carry.

This isn't transformation so much as revelation, allowing these materials to speak their contradictions, to make tangible the systems of value and devaluation they've moved through. There's something almost devotional in this attention to the ordinary, treating mundane objects with the reverence usually reserved for the sacred. The reclamation happens in this shift of attention, in refusing the hierarchies that determine what deserves to be contemplated and what remains background.

Your large-scale site-specific installations are deeply tied to their environments. How does the physical or cultural context of a space or location influence your work, and what challenges arise when translating personal or collective memory into spatial experiences?

I approach sites as witnesses, each space carries contextual layers, use, and intention that become material for the work. The architecture, light, soundscape, and cultural context all exert pressures that shape what emerges. Rather than imposing a predetermined vision, I enter into conversation with these elements, allowing the specificities of place to intersect with formal and conceptual decisions. This responsiveness creates works that couldn't exist elsewhere, that resist documentation and reproduction. The challenge lies in creating experiences that honour the density and specificity of memory while remaining porous enough for others to enter.

I often work through contradiction — creating installations that feel simultaneously ubiquitous and monumental, that evoke intimacy within public space. There's always tension between the visible and invisible aspects of the work, between what can be perceived immediately and what reveals itself through sustained engagement. This mirrors the experience of cultural displacement, where meaning often operates on multiple registers simultaneously. The most significant challenge isn't technical but ethical: how to create work that acknowledges the complexity of collective memories without reducing lived experience to abstraction or simply making it palatable.

Your practice blends deeply personal references with broader socio-cultural commentary. How do you balance the tension between individual nostalgia and universal resonance, without diluting the specificity of your work?

My process involves a continuous dialogue between internal perspective and external conditions, positioning subjective experience in relation to our most pressing shared challenges. The most personal experiences often reveal structural conditions; conversely, social forces manifest through intensely intimate moments. There's a necessary opacity in this approach. Not everything in the work is meant to be immediately legible to all viewers, just as aspects of any cultural experience remain partially untranslatable. This inherent view creates space for imagination rather than appropriation, for recognition without possession. The resonance emerges not from diluting specificity but from the shared experience of navigating between worlds, between what we inherit and what we create.

You describe your practice as a form of resistance against weaponised narratives. How do you envision viewers engaging with this resistance, and what responsibility do you feel artists have in confronting systems of power through their work?

Everything is political, but not everything is politics. When my work appears outside of the gallery setting, it creates encounters that weren't sought, moments where the body registers something before the mind categorises it. This bypasses the usual filters through which we process experience, creating fissures in habitual perception. There's a particular discomfort that arises when confronted with materialised contradictions, when objects refuse to stay in their assigned places, when histories presumed forgotten reassert their presence. The resistance isn't didactic but embodied, located in the physical experience of moving through spaces configured to disrupt expected hierarchies of attention. I'm interested in forms of engagement that don't begin with understanding but with presence, with the willingness to remain in uncertainty, to experience the jarring feeling of encountering what can't be easily assimilated.

The responsibility isn't to provide solutions but to create instances where the illusion of inevitability surrounding current configurations of power momentarily dissolves. To persistently ask: what other ways of being together might be possible? What histories and futures become thinkable when dominant narratives lose their grip? The work must ultimately speak through its material presence, through textures, scale, weight, and sound, creating experiences that resist language while demanding response. This insistence on physicality counters the abstraction through which systems of power operate, returning us to the irrefutable evidence of the body and its knowing.

Learn more about Sejal Parekh here; and follow her here.

If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:

Satpreet Kahlon's Artistic Practice Embraces Illegibility As A Form Of Self-Protection

Fresh Produce 2025: Method Is Bringing Its Experimental Art To Delhi

Visions Of Another Future: The Spectacular, Speculative Worlds Of Rithika Merchant