Anatomies of Displacement (2024) is an experimental documentary-fiction short film that traces the intimate contours of transnational, intergenerational, and personal displacement while excavating shadowed experiences of interconnected grief and guilt following disaster. My maternal lineage was displaced from Indigenous Marma tribe lands due to the construction of a USAID funded hydroelectric dam in the 1960s; my mother was displaced from her homeland to the U.S by the forces of globalization-linked ecological degradation and imperially implanted political conflict in the 1980s; I was displaced from my childhood home in the aftermath of unbearable emotional turmoil and maternal grief resulting from twin climate disasters spanning Bangladesh and California in 2020—Cyclone Amphan leading to the sudden death of several maternal family members in Bangladesh, and the Santa Cruz Wildfires, which burned down a sacred place of solace in the ancient redwood forests that I had sought refuge in since childhood. Through a synthesis of documentary footage, photographs, and sound recordings collected on ancestral lands over the course of a decade, and films/performances/texts created while drifting between deserts and oceans, living in domestic exile on the road for over a year, this work explores the cyclical nature of unhealed trauma, migration/escape as survival mechanisms, and consequently fractured / re-hybridized relationships with land, culture, family, and identity. 

Exhibited at Dalit Dreamlands, ARTtogether Oakland + Oakland Asian Cultural Center with the Asian-American Women Artists Association. Spring 2024.