Tanvi Ranjan

Tanvi Ranjan (b. 1995, India) is a multimedia artist whose works include textile, sculpture, moving image, and sound. Her practice methodically explores language structures and communication between humans and machines by elaborating on techniques of textile making, more often knitting. She uses knitting techniques like loop-based structure of knits, and other tools and machinery as a metaphor to inform the feedback loop mechanism as she investigates and reflects upon her inquiries.

The artist reflects on her own experience of working in knitting factories in India to address discourses around industrialization which remains entangled within India’s colonized history. In her recent works, she juxtaposes the sociopolitical nature of language with the binary logic in computers and analyses it with a decolonial lens. The artist often evidences cyberfeminist takes on language by foregrounding coded information and patterns in her works, thus stressing on the labour of handling secrecy systems and investigating what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein calls the “private language”.

Tanvi Ranjan completed her Bachelor of Design in Knitwear Design at National Institute of Fashion Technology, India (2017) and Master of Fine Arts at Kingston School of Art, London (2023). A new body of works by the artist were recently displayed in a solo exhibition Industrial Evolution at Fuse Box, Kingston upon Thames (2023). Other group shows include Sustanable Futures by Dhaga at Fuse Box, Kingston upon Thames (2023) Metamorphosis at Stanley Picker Gallery (2023), Fibres at AIR Gallery, Manchester (2023), Global Voices Local Places at Not My Beautiful House, Kingston upon Thames (2022), Visibility of the Invisible at Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston upon Thames (2022)