Before
Works in the ‘before’ section mark an earlier chapter in my practice—where I first began exploring how bodies move through systems, structures, and stories not always visible to the eye.
Each piece begins with a question: What does it feel like to be shaped by the environments we inhabit? What rhythms do we internalize without knowing?
Whether in a factory, a public space, a temperature-controlled room, or a moment of near-stillness, I was drawn to how invisible infrastructures—migration protocols, HVAC systems, labor routines—press against the body. And how, in return, the body remembers, resists, or transforms.
These videos and performances are acts of listening. To machines. To repetition. To the hush beneath motion. In many ways, they laid the groundwork for how I now think about sound, movement, and the poetics of systems—where even the most mechanized act can hold the potential for intimacy and transformation.
HVAC: Thermal Comfort
Performance Installation, 2018
HVAC: Thermal Comfort is a sculptural sound performance that probes the quiet violence of climate-controlled interiors. In collaboration with Dana Hemenway, this work stages an embodied meditation on how Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning systems shape and suppress the body's natural responses—sweat, shiver, thirst, ache.
Intensities
Video Installation, 2016
Intensities is a meditation on stillness as quiet resistance. Through close observation of micro-movements and tremors of balance, the work invites viewers to slow down and consider the body as a site of endurance. In this suspended state, even the smallest gestures hold transformative potential.
Body in Transit
Performance & Single Channel Video, 2016
Body in Transit is a 30-minute video work exploring movement, waiting, and the psychic weight of forced migration. Featuring text by Dorothy Santos and movement by Shinichi Iova-Koga, the piece weaves poetry, sound, and choreography into a visceral meditation on displacement. Originally performed live, it evokes both the rupture and resilience carried in the migrant body.
Remedies
Video Installation, 2014
Remedies is a three-part audiovisual installation inspired by the pharmaceutical factory run by Saraf’s family in Indore. Translating industrial rhythms into ritual, the work combines factory recordings, choreographed performances, and sculptural video boxes to explore transformation across bodies, materials, and memory. It is not a critique, but an embodied return—a child’s memory reimagined through movement and sound.
Oscillations
Multimedia Interactive Installation, 2012
Oscillations is a two-part project—an installation and live performance—that explores perception, presence, and the sensory boundaries of performance. Created with Sebastian Alvarez, the work shifts between human and machine performers, guiding audiences through a sonic ritual experienced with eyes closed. It questions how intimacy and affect persist in a world of automation and sensory overload.
Fold {Live}
Site Specific Live Performances, 2011-12
Fold {Live} is a performance adaptation of the video work FOLD, transforming the solitary act of folding laundry into a collective choreography. Featuring 16 to 25 performers, the piece explores repetition, rhythm, and shared labor through synchronized everyday gestures. It brings private ritual into public space, revealing the quiet poetics of collective action.
FOLD
Video Installation, 2010
FOLD transforms the mundane act of folding laundry into a densely layered audiovisual ritual. Composed of a 96-channel grid, the work magnifies a single day’s solitary gesture into a swarm of subtle variation—each video a thread in a larger tapestry of repetition, routine, and rhythm.
PEEL
Single Channel Video Installation, 2009
Peel is an early video work in which the simple act of cooking becomes a study in rhythm, repetition, and sensory layering. Multiple frames show the artist performing everyday gestures—chopping vegetables, stirring, tucking a strand of hair—transformed through superimposition and synchronicity into a flowing visual composition.
