Neither/Nor: A Duo Show by Rum Hansra & Sayak Mitra - An encounter between inner world and the architectures that give it form.
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Opening Reception: Sat, November 15, 2025 | 7:00 – 9:00pm
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Curatorial Note: Rum and Sayak approach the question of identity and representation from distinct yet intersecting vantage points. While Rum’s practice emerges from lived experience—of negotiating selfhood across cultural thresholds and social frameworks—Sayak’s work interrogates the systemic superstructure and ideological conditions that produce and regulate those very thresholds.Rum’s figures, often fragmented, veiled, or suspended between states of presence and absence, articulate the intimate dissonance of inhabiting multiple cultural worlds. Her work makes visible the fragility and resilience of a self continually shaped by both belonging and estrangement. Sayak, on the other hand, locates this tension within broader historical and political economies, drawing on frameworks of postcolonial critique, class struggle, and mass culture to question the very structures that naturalize “multiculturalism” while perpetuating otherness.Seen together, their practices form a dialectic between the personal and the systemic. Rum traces the internal negotiations of identity, while Sayak exposes the external forces that frame, commodify, and fracture or puncture it. Dhoop (incense stick) ashes, imported burlap rice bag, used coffee grounds, wooden pallets, and ESIM bag-zip ties are usual landfill or upcycled protagonists in Sayak’s work, sparking complicit forces from the rhizomatic attributes to the microbial activity. Rum works with acrylics, collage, and worn textiles to explore how memory is layered, altered, and renewed. Through acts of construction and erasure, her work traces the porous boundaries between past and present, self and world—a continual process of becoming. The works of both artists suggest that selfhood emerges not in isolation or as a fixed construct, but through the ongoing negotiation between inner experience and the shifting forces of culture, power, and representation.

‍About the Artists:
Sayak Mitra – Painter and interdisciplinary artist, Sayak’s work challenges societal structures and notions of multiculturalism, using materials like upcycled coffee grounds, burlap, and pallets to explore power, culture, and otherness. Born in Konnagar, India, and now living in the U.S., Sayak has exhibited internationally and received awards including the Hugh and Marjorie Petersen Award for Public Art and the Atul Bose Award for Painting.

‍Rum Hansra – Visual artist exploring memory, identity, and transformation through a vivid color palette. Based in San Francisco and Pittsburgh, Rum reconfigures fragments of personal and collective history into layered works that blur the line between real and imagined. Recent exhibitions include mossArchitects gallery and Atithi Gallery.Open TO ALL - RSVP Today to attend the opening reception and experience this multi-layered exploration of identity, culture, and selfhood.