Making “living photographs” that change daily
This week, we welcome Kanishka Kanishka, a New York City-based Indian visual artist whose practice explores interspecies collaboration and ecological entanglement as ways to reimagine archives, kinship and knowledge.
She received her MFA in photography from Parsons School of Design in 2025. Her work has appeared in a two-person exhibition at Lorimoto Gallery in Ridgewood and in group exhibitions at Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery at Parsons, BAXTER ST at CCNY in the Lower East Side, Elizabeth Street Garden in SoHo, Photoville in Brooklyn, New York and Woman Made Gallery in Chicago. She has also showed her work abroad at the Lishui Photography Festival in China, Vinzenz Wien in Austria and Jaipur Art Week in India.
Her photography and writing have been published in Back Matter, Rukhmabai Initiatives and Columbia Journal. Kanishka has presented her research through artist talks at Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Paris and the Society for Photographic Education’s 2026 Annual Conference in Atlanta. She is a recipient of the 2026 En Foco Fellowship.
Kanishka’s current work began with her “matrilineal archive,” a collection of family photographs of her mother and grandmother. Rather than simply preserve those images, she “mutates” them with Physarum polycephalum (slime mold), an acellular organism that interests the scientific community due to its computational abilities that exist without a brain.
Inspired by its resilience, she expands her archive into an evolving organism that blurs the boundaries between human and non-human worlds. The work unfolds as “living photographs” that change daily, shaped by processes of growth and care.
“Rooted in eco-feminist theory, I investigate how labor, particularly women’s and non-human labor, is exploited or obscured within capitalist systems and acknowledge our common status as raw materials,” said Kanishka. “I question what we ‘know’ about intelligence to assert the position of my mother, my maternal grandmother, and the slime mold as thinkers, innovators, everyday rebels, and aliens who constructed a new world and imagined new ways of being.”
“The process of growing slime mold has also made me a caregiver of a living photograph. I clean the slime. I feed it.”That care is at the heart of the project, which reimagines family as something that stretches across human and nonhuman worlds.
“If unconventional caregiving modes are explored, can they be revolutionary?” she said.
See more of Kanishka’s work on her website.
