Pragati Gunasekar (b.1990, Chennai, India) is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, video, and installation, engaging with the material, emotional, and symbolic weight of form.
Pragati holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art, where she appointed Adjunct Faculty for Summer Residency Program, 2025. She has also served as a Brand Educator for Winsor & Newton (2021–2022), and her work has been exhibited in New York, Chennai, Dubai, and internationally.
My practice begins where the archive ends—where voices have been silenced, names omitted, and truths buried beneath layers of caste, race, color, class, gender, and forgetting. I return to these absences not to fill them, but to listen. Through painting, installation, and quiet acts of making, I trace the contours of stories denied the right to remain.
Caste is not a metaphor. It is structure, repetition, bureaucracy, and dust—embedded in the systems that decide who is remembered, who is erased, and who is allowed to speak. My work slows down these mechanisms of exclusion, holding space for what cannot be fully shown, resolved, or archived.
I work with materials that hold memory in their fibers—coconut coir, turmeric, clay, banana leaf—substances shaped by labor, ritual, and decay. In my practice, the body itself becomes a site of memory, and materials become vessels for what official histories cannot contain. Drawing from testimony, refusal, and ancestral memory, I do not seek to romanticize pain, but to name what is ongoing and still urgent.
Pragati has led 300+ online and in-person workshops for over 1,000 participants across India, the US, Canada, and the Gulf. Her partnerships span multinational corporates, educational, and community settings — including Tanishq (TATA, India), Winsor & Newton (UK), Simeio Solutions (US), Art Lounge Mumbai, India etc.
She has also conducted workshops dedicated to COVID-19 relief and social impact.
