Vaishnavi Khullar is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is rooted in memory, diaspora, and the evolving relationship she has with her cultural identity. Born and raised in India and now based in Canada, her practice draws from vivid childhood dreams, identity, and the shifting perspective that comes with distance from home.
She graduated from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2020 with a major in Media Arts. During her university years, while navigating the challenges of living away from home, her work often explored themes of colonialism, displacement, and identity, an attempt to make sense of her place in a foreign landscape. Over time, her practice has shifted from questioning who she is to celebrating and delving into the identity she deeply loves and cherishes. With a signifiant influence of Indian folk art from the bengal region and also her love for Indian maximalism as she likes to call it.
Now, at 27, her art has become sustenance: a place she returns to in joy, loneliness, grief, and curiosity. Her practice centers on the nuances of diaspora, identity, and Indian stylistic traditions; it preserves memories while creating new ones. Ironically, she finds herself learning more about her culture now while living far from it, than she ever did while she was home.
Art has been her constant since she began painting in 2013. It carried her through some of the hardest moments of her life, including the loss of her father this year. In grief she discovered that art cannot always hold everything, nor can it keep her from falling apart. But it showed her something else: she cannot outrun it either. Art has always returned to her as a saving grace, a practice that deepened through persistence, and a place where she can be completely honest.
For Vaishnavi, art is sustenance—a way of remembering, a way of questioning, a way of staying connected, and a way of becoming.
Vaishnavi Khullar 