Mashal Chaudhri (b. 1983, Karachi) is a mixed media artist based in London. Her inquiries centre around knowledge and the nature of knowing. She investigates these ideas through making, movement and sitting meditation practices. Chaudhri’s research travels readily between the lived experiences of women in her family and craft practices of South Asia. Her engagement with history is bodily and ongoing.

Prior to completing her MA in Textiles at the Royal College of Art, Chaudhri studied at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where she majored in Science, Technology and International Affairs.

Chaudhri’s inquiries for the past two years circle steadily around the question of what it means to make a relation. Two tenets anchor the work: that knowledge-seeking is a practice in service of relation, and embodiment is a critical starting point for knowledge. 

She uses craft-based processes to gather insight and make relations with self, place, creatures and matter. Slowness is privileged to encourage stillness and allow insight to arise in the body. 

The work finds its roots in Chaudhri’s own Vipassana meditation practice, and the thesis of Donna Haraway’s 1984 article: ‘Situated Knowledges’ which interrogates and dismantles the notion of scientific objectivity, arguing instead for a knowledge that is partial, subjective, and embodied. 

When we learn to see from inside our own bodies, we understand that there is no transcendence, no god’s eye view. That all views come from an inhabited body, thus necessarily representing a partial perspective — and that we are all “answerable for what we learn how to see”.

(Haraway, Donna, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, (1988), pp. 583, JSTOR.)

Chaudhri examines making as an investigative act. Her belief is that life can be full of these, and they all ask: what is possible? And what else? Engaging in these acts helps one to return and remember. Meanings are assigned and invoked, but with a light touch. This too, is learning a history or a story. It is a way of being in the world that prizes 'finding out', and it is alive, incomplete and never ending.  

As a practitioner, she often uses a textile or material artefact as a starting point -- an apt vehicle, a receptacle, a holder. A textile process is a way of seeking insight - for quieting the discursive mind, finding flow, and letting another intelligence emerge. 

Processes combine to give insight about the nature of living, relating and being in the body. Histories are shown to be non-textual, bodily, carried and held. Outcomes are incidental, and no one piece can claim to be the 'hero’ of the story.