Design
Art
Creative Direction
Tags
Selected Works
Contact me
Design
Art
Creative Direction
Tags
Selected Works
Contact me
"Subscriber Identity Module V2"
Steel 6'3" × 3'11", 300 KG
2025
Steel 6'3" × 3'11", 300 KG
2025
Exhibited at
"Good Company", Rizq Art Gallery, May 2026
"Relics of Tomorrow" NYU Abu Dhabi, November 2025
"Good Company", Rizq Art Gallery, May 2026
"Relics of Tomorrow" NYU Abu Dhabi, November 2025
Subscriber Identity Module V2 is a monumental reimagining of the SIM card as an object of migration, memory, family, and belonging.
For someone who has grown up between India and the UAE, the SIM card has become an unexpected marker of home. Each time I land in either country, switching SIM cards is one of the first things I do. It is a small ritual that signals arrival, a moment when one place gives way to another. I may not always carry documents that identify where I belong, but I carry these two small pieces of plastic everywhere I go.
The SIM card becomes more than a tool for communication. It holds a connection to family, familiarity, and the places that have shaped me. For migrants and diasporas, home can become something fragmented and portable, carried through objects, routines, memories, and the people we remain connected to across borders.
The original Subscriber Identity Module was a smaller version of the work, also waterjet cut from stainless steel and weighing approximately 30 kilograms. For V2, I wanted to push the same object to an entirely different physical and emotional scale. A SIM card is almost invisible in everyday life, disappearing inside a phone, yet it can carry an enormous emotional significance. It connects me to family, to memory, and to the places I call home.
V2 enlarges this tiny object to over six feet and increases its weight tenfold, from approximately 30 to 300 kilograms. The decision to make it this large is an attempt to give physical form to something that is otherwise intangible: the emotional weight of migration and the complexity of belonging to more than one place.
The transformation also creates a contradiction. A SIM card is designed to be portable, replaceable, and almost disposable. This one is physically impossible to carry. What normally travels with me becomes immovable. What is normally hidden becomes monumental. The object that represents my ability to move between homes is itself unable to move.
Through this contradiction, Subscriber Identity Module V2 reflects on the experience of migration and diaspora, where belonging can feel both deeply rooted and perpetually in transit. It asks whether home is somewhere we return to, something we carry with us, or something that exists somewhere between the places we come from and the places we have made our own.
For someone who has grown up between India and the UAE, the SIM card has become an unexpected marker of home. Each time I land in either country, switching SIM cards is one of the first things I do. It is a small ritual that signals arrival, a moment when one place gives way to another. I may not always carry documents that identify where I belong, but I carry these two small pieces of plastic everywhere I go.
The SIM card becomes more than a tool for communication. It holds a connection to family, familiarity, and the places that have shaped me. For migrants and diasporas, home can become something fragmented and portable, carried through objects, routines, memories, and the people we remain connected to across borders.
The original Subscriber Identity Module was a smaller version of the work, also waterjet cut from stainless steel and weighing approximately 30 kilograms. For V2, I wanted to push the same object to an entirely different physical and emotional scale. A SIM card is almost invisible in everyday life, disappearing inside a phone, yet it can carry an enormous emotional significance. It connects me to family, to memory, and to the places I call home.
V2 enlarges this tiny object to over six feet and increases its weight tenfold, from approximately 30 to 300 kilograms. The decision to make it this large is an attempt to give physical form to something that is otherwise intangible: the emotional weight of migration and the complexity of belonging to more than one place.
The transformation also creates a contradiction. A SIM card is designed to be portable, replaceable, and almost disposable. This one is physically impossible to carry. What normally travels with me becomes immovable. What is normally hidden becomes monumental. The object that represents my ability to move between homes is itself unable to move.
Through this contradiction, Subscriber Identity Module V2 reflects on the experience of migration and diaspora, where belonging can feel both deeply rooted and perpetually in transit. It asks whether home is somewhere we return to, something we carry with us, or something that exists somewhere between the places we come from and the places we have made our own.