Priya Kambli's photographic approach is rooted in interventions with her family inheritance — a personal archive of photographs and heirlooms. She brought this archive with her to the United States at age 18, a few years after the death of her parents. Her work places this personal history within the broader context of migrant narratives and feminist practice, drawing new lines of belonging for the future. It also inadvertently explores a question posed by her son Kavi at age three: did she belong to two different worlds, since she spoke two different languages? The essence of that question continues to be a driving force in her art-making.
Kambli’s artwork has been exhibited, published, collected and reviewed in the national and international photographic community. Her work has been exhibited at the Nelson Atkins Museum in Missouri, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Arts in Kansas, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Virgina, and the National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at 2021London. Her work has been published in Aperture, Being and Becoming: Asian in America, PIX photography quarterly magazine, Passages: a subcontinental imaginary, and Photography: A Feminist History by Emma Lewis. Kambli received her B.F.A. at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette and an M.F.A. from the University of Houston. She is currently Professor of Art at Truman State University in Kirksville, MO.
At MacDowell, she worked on a new performance-based photographic work titled The idea of home follows me wherever I go. This new body of work connects her photographic archive and mother’s objects of worship with the American landscape, drawing new lines of belonging and visually considering the question, “How do I, an immigrant, belong to my adopted land?” This project expands her current studio-based practice to include fieldwork. It stands in a postcolonial context, reframing the American landscape from an immigrant’s perspective all with the intention of building an archive of belonging, that revises absence and loss, connecting her and her ancestors to an adopted land., simultaneously, seeking to challenge the role photography has played in the representation and erasure of American identities and to upend the myth of the photographic landscape as benign and unburdened by politics.
