Pragati Gunasekar (b.1990, Chennai, India) is a New York–based interdisciplinary conceptual 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 was appointed Adjunct Faculty at NYAA for Summer Residency Program, 2025. She has also served as a Brand Educator for Winsor & Newton (2021–22), and her work has been exhibited in New York, Chennai, Dubai, and internationally.
My practice begins where the archive ends—where voices are silenced, names withheld, and truths lie buried within intra‑race hierarchies of casta(lineage), color, class, gender, and forgetting. I listen into these absences, tracing the contours of stories denied the right to remain. Through painting, installation, and quiet acts of making, I work to dismantle the structures that sort bodies by proximity to power and pigment.
My research-driven work is committed to dismantling these hierarchies, interrogating how Brownness, Whiteness, and Blackness are manufactured, policed, and internalized, and how the feeling of “not-enoughness” migrates across bodies and borders. I treat caste as a global architecture of belonging and exclusion, slowing its mechanisms so the unseen and unspoken can surface.
I work with materials that hold memory—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 Dubai. Her collaborations 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.