Vedika Rampal
*Winner of TWT Excellence Prize*
Forms of a Fermenting Fantasy, 2023
digital images hand-transferred onto copper, 3 channel video and acrylic sheet
What if all encounters were simultaneous? Rampal's interdisciplinary practice is interested in excavating pre-colonial histories and knowledges within the post-colonial present. In doing so, thier work navigates through the violent residues of Empire which collapse all linear temporalities, bleeding through the past and into the present. They interrogate Western museological modalities that perceive art/efacts as distinct from cultures to uncover how these materials and objects containing potential histories resist inscription, plunder and reproduction through fragmentation. Committed to unlearning imperialism, Vedika researches the past, not to possess a nostalgia for lost origins but rather to rupture these fissures within the present moment and create an openness – a momentum forward rather than inward. Their work ruminates upon the possibility of forms without centres, upon decolonial pilgrimages from periphery to periphery.
