Installation View
Image Credit: Serendipity Arts Festival
Image Credit: Serendipity Arts Festival
Inayat Khan's Bed
Title: Inayat Khan’s Bed (Production assistance: Amith M. Nayak and Mr. Pappu)
Size: 51” x 71.5”
Medium: Quilt
Year: 2025
Image Credit: Namya Chadha
‘Inayat Khan’s Bed’ reimagines a 17th-century Mughal miniature painting that depicts the nobleman, Inayat Khan, on his deathbed, weakened by opium and alcohol addiction.
This quilt, scaled to the dimensions of a Mughal day cot, is an homage to his bed—a space of comfort and rest, but also a witness to pain, illness, and the quiet violences that mark the body. What does a bed remember of those it once held?
The figure of Inayat Khan here has been redacted yet cushioned to think through absence, loss, and disability, and what it means when the body becomes inseparable from the bed that sustains it. The work holds space for vulnerability, endurance, the quiet intimacies of sickness and caregiving.
A Moment of Respite from the St. Petersburg Muraqqa
Title: A Moment of Respite from the St. Petersburg Muraqqa (Fabrication by Tuft Place)
Size: 25” x 55”
Medium: Wool-tufted rug
Year: 2025
Image Credit: Namya Chadha
This cat suckling her kittens are taken from a debatable Mughal painting, from the St. Petersburg muraqqa (album). A few animals in the original painting seem composed in a landscape amid violent animal struggles on the top half of the page. Typical of a muraqqa page of the time, where many of these scenes function as individual studies that are collaged together rather than one uniformly composed painting, we imagine this image as a moment of respite in the chaos of disabled living.
Reference images from the 17th century Mughal atelier.
Kids plucking the cats' fur
Video Credit: Namya Chadha
Video Credit: Namya Chadha