Karen Dias

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

I am an interdisciplinary artist from Mumbai living in New York City. My practice spans across lens-based media, photography, sculpture and installation. After over a decade-long career as a photojournalist, my recent work is rooted in the investigation of the role of documentary images and their relevance and evolution as reliable documents of our time. This investigation into the function and responsibility of images also informs my sculptural practice. My work thinks around visual representations of state violence, power, suffering, and death while exploring its often illegible and obscure manifestations in our daily lives. Through the use of everyday materials, like razor blades, dried red chilies, medical gauze, safety pins, salt, and plaster among others; my practice explores how elements of legalized, state-sanctioned violence can be in-built and circulate through the foundation of our society, at the intersection of where the personal and domestic meet the political and institutional. Playing with semiotics, emblems, icons and motifs, I lead the viewer to question their role as a participant, bystander or witness in acts of violence and oppression explored through the image/object's potential for malleability, ephemerality and fragmentation. My work has been exhibited in India, UAE, France and the US. I have been a grantee of the International Women’s Media Foundation and an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA in 2022. I have taught at the International Center of...

Artwork

• We Watch From The Margins, 2021. Red chillies, steel wire
• Smoke and Mirrors, 2021. Cyanotype on paper
• The Three Pillars of My Democracy, 2022. Safety pins
• A proactive society finds ways to protect itself in the face of state-sponsored violence in times of state-manufactured unrest at a location as near or as far away from you as you can imagine. But what if it didn’t need to?, 2020. Wood shelves, water, milk, Coca Cola, vegetable oil, red onion, lemon, medical mask, rubber gloves, smart phone, medical gauze, stones, book Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman
• Isthmus, 2022. Collagraph on paper
• A Red Line Under A Blue Sky, 2021. Razor blades