There’s something about steel utensils that screams 'home' to anyone from India. This is not the Pinterest-perfect, ceramic-bowl-and-cloth-napkin lifestyle, but one that is more conducive to real, rooted, daily meals with your family; the kind where the clink of a steel katori being stacked in the kitchen is a soundscape all of us are familiar with; where the thali, a no-nonsense round plate made of steel or copper, is less of a dining choice and more of a cultural inevitability.
You won’t find a steel thali making an appearance in your average Instagram tablescape. It’s not 'aesthetic' enough. But here, it is our truth. It’s represents, class, culture, economy, and a kind of legacy, etched into the everyday fabric of Indian life.
Which is why Mirrors for Aliens, a 2023 artwork by design duo Soft Geometry becomes a symbol of where we come from. Utharaa L Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary — both born and raised in India, now navigating life in the US on work visas — turned something as ordinary as a steel thali into a layered, introspective sculpture. They polished it into a mirror, not to reflect the world as it is, but to reveal the haze of identity when you live in-between. Not quite Indian-American, definitely not American, and technically (as per the ever-compassionate USCIS) — 'Non-Resident Aliens'.
Mirrors for Aliens is both poetic and practical. The steel thali — robust, frugal, unbreakable — stands in for the Indian spirit. The mirrored finish is soft distortion of the self, like trying to make sense of who you are in translation. It’s shiny, faint, and slightly off — kind of like the immigrant experience itself.
The work was recently acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) for its Architecture + Design Permanent Collection — a huge nod to how the personal is also political, and how objects of 'use' can hold more meaning than meets the eye.
Soft Geometry poses the unassuming thali as a vessel of memory, migration, and a reclamation of culture. In reimagining it as a mirrored surface, they offer us a way to look at identity through the blur of displacement, and belonging. It touches upon not just where you’re from or where you are, but how you hold both at once, even when they don’t always align.
Follow Soft Geometry here.
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