mohini kaur

Artist Bio

Mohini Kaur (b. 1994, India/UK) is a London-based artist working across painting, installation, sculpture, photography and sound. Her practice is a lived spiritual inquiry into how transcendence is felt and resisted in the body, where sensation becomes a means of encountering knowledge passed down through generations.

Through a framework she calls The Long Ancestral Body, Kaur situates the self within an ecological and ancestral continuum that remains alive in the present, with Shakti, the feminine creative force that animates all things, at its heart. The female body is her method more than her subject, a way of sensing what exceeds the individual. Shifting between mediums has always felt natural to her, and one form will often ask to become another.

In painting, Shakti becomes physical. Kaur works with her hands and extends her gestures across ten-metre rolls of canvas, following intensity and excess further whenever they arrive. Her paintings carry the pull between the delicate and the destructive, and let this contradiction stay together as part of what it is to live in a woman’s body.

Kaur mixes paints with materials that come from devotional practice. Kumkum and sacred ash arrive with long histories of prayer, and once on the canvas they continue to change as they dry, in ways she can guide but never fully decide. The Hindi word ‘kal’, meaning both yesterday and tomorrow, informs her understanding of inheritance as something that holds past and future at once. Certain paintings are made with an awareness of their impermanence and the possibility of their eventual return to the earth. She draws on Tantric thought as one of several paths, particularly its understanding of the sacred as woven through all of existence, including what feels raw, dirty or unresolved.

Kaur is drawn to work that asks something of those who meet it. Her installations invite visitors to approach and take part, while paintings printed onto sarees allow the work to be draped and worn beyond the exhibition space. More recently her practice has extended into sound, where her own voice and field recordings are set into loops that circle towards trance.

Her solo exhibition ‘On Becoming A Travelling Altar’, curated by ZHANG Hailun, opens at OmVed Gardens, London, in November 2026. Kaur holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2025) and a BA in French and Philosophy from King’s College London.