BORDERLAND

Guest organized by Tariq Allana, Associate Director of Art Heritage and Co-Founder of Delhi Art Week, BORDERLAND brings together four contemporary artists from two continents in an exploration of assimilation.

Embracing the complex meanings and implications of the term, this year's Mary B. Howard artists examine the concept of assimilation and its multiplicities along a continuum: from enforced submission and concealment, through agency and negotiated belonging, toward its longer-term outcomes. Across lens-based media, sculpture, painting, and artist books, Avijit Dutta (Kolkata, India), Michelle Shengyu Li (Baltimore, MD, USA, and Toronto, Canada), Mathilde Mujanayi (Baltimore, MD, USA), and Sunanda Khajuria (India and China) occupy the threshold between two- and three-dimensional forms. Together, their works approach assimilation as a complex, unresolved field of experience shaped by cultural, material, conceptual, and familial forces.

Michelle Shengyu Li

Michelle Shengyu Li (b. Vancouver, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist based between Baltimore, USA and Vancouver, Canada. Through sculpture, installation, and photography, her practice speculates belief and belonging in tensions to land, diaspora, (in)visibility, and the sacredness of life/death. Often working with wood, paper, wax, and living organisms, many of her pieces are transitory bodies that mediate the fluidity of eternal elements like fire, wind, desire, and migration.

Li’s work has been featured across Baltimore and New York including exhibitions at Area 405, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, and BioBAT Art Space as well as Issue 21 of BmoreArt: “The Future.” She is a 2026 Janet & Walter Sondheim Semifinalist and a recipient of the Carolyn J. Springborn Fellowship at the Haystack Mountain School of Craft.

Sunanda Khajuria

Sunanda Khajuria’s practice explores transformation, identity, and the lived experience of existing between cultures, geographies, and states of mind. Her time in China brought her into dialogue with Taoist principles of flow and impermanence. Sunanda’s work is rooted in the emotional realities of migration: the invisible weight of longing, loss, and survival that women carry across borders. Blending Indian and Chinese aesthetics, she creates works that reflect memory, resilience, and the ongoing process of becoming through luminous color and meticulous brushwork. Her evolving practice also examines gender, femininity, and human relationships, reinterpreting history through a cross-cultural lens. Working across acrylic on canvas, Chinese ink and mineral color on paper and silk, she transforms lived experience and emotional landscapes into poetic visual form.

Sunanda Khajuria (b. 1979, Jammu) is an Indian artist, researcher, and academic, currently serving as Assistant Professor at Wuhan University of Technology, China. She earned her Ph.D. from Wuhan University of Technology (2024), an MFA in Painting from the College of Art, New Delhi (2005), and a BFA in Painting from the Institute of Music and Fine Art, University of Jammu, Jammu (2002). She also completed an Advanced Research Program at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. She has received numerous honors, including the Second National Award by the Chinese Government (2024) and the Princess Sirivannavari Fellowship (Thailand, 2020). In 2020–21, she was a Visiting Artist Fellow at Harvard University’s Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute. Her work has been widely exhibited, with solo exhibitions including Beyond Borders: Who I Am Between Homes (2026), IA&A at Hillyer, Washington DC and I Have Lost Me: Birds of Passage (2022), Art Heritage, New Delhi; and group shows at the International Triennial of Graphic Art Bitola, Macedonia (2025); ASEAN Culture and Art Creation Season-6, Xiamen, China (2025); Geumgang Nature Art Biennale, South Korea (2025); and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (2023). She has also participated in multiple editions of NADA Miami, the India Art Fair, and at the Mumbai Art Fair. Sunanda is represented by Art Heritage gallery, New Delhi.

Mathilde Kabuka Mujanayi 

With a BA in photography from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Mathilde Kabuka Mujanayi exercises various mediums through the lens of photography including fiber, installation, sculpture and performance in order to address personally led narratives. Rather than having a conclusive, definite idea or resolution, her work examines and documents the feelings encompassing an experience. Her practice aims to bring more nuance to an apathetic-led narrative surrounding migrants.

Mujanayi was recently one out of 149 shortlisted and exhibited artists for the Photovogue Global open call. She was also one of 30 artists to receive the Aperture x GooglePixel Photo Fund. Within the same year, she was awarded the Jim Burger Thesis Award and was shortlisted for Daniele Tamagni Grant. Mujanayi has exhibited with The National Museum of Cameroon through the Yaounde Festival. She has also exhibited with The Peale Museum, Hamiltonian Artists in The Umbrella Art Fair, Candela Books + Gallery, Silver Eye Center, and the Art.Write.Now. Tour! At the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, amongst others.

Avijit Dutta

Avijit Dutta’s practice is deeply rooted in his lived experience of Howrah, West Bengal—an urban industrial landscape often called the “Sheffield of the East.” Born and raised amid the hum of small factories, and in a family connected to his father’s thonga (paper bag) business, Avijit’s visual language grows from this environment of resilience, struggle, and the human spirit. Through surreal yet grounded depictions, he portrays a community that finds fleeting humor, solidarity, and dignity amid hardship. Ultimately, his work stands as a tribute to the common man: a meditation on labor, survival, and the unyielding fight for existence that defines the human condition.

Avijit Dutta (b. 1997, West Bengal) holds a BFA degree in Painting from the College of Visual Art, Kolkata (2020) and an MFA degree in Painting from the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata (2022). Recent group exhibitions include SVIKRITI, Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Kolkata (2025); 58th Annual Exhibition, Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Kolkata (2025); Abir First Take, Hutheesing Visual Art Centre, Ahmedabad (2024); IMAGINARIUM 4.0, Emami Art, Kolkata (2024); Emerging Palettes 14, Srishti Art, Hyderabad, (2024); The Observer’s Reflection (2023); and On the Threshold of Time (2023), Art Heritage, New Delhi; among others. His recognitions include the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant (2025) Birla Academy of Art & Culture 58th Annual Award (2025), Abir First Take Award (2024), First Award at IMAGINARIUM 4.0 (2024), the Rabindranath Tagore Award (2022), and the Most Promising Artist award from the Art Society of India (2020–2021). In 2023, he presented a solo online exhibition, Beyond the Industrial Veil: Metaphors of Howrah, on Terrain.art, and his work has been shown at multiple editions of NADA Miami and the India Art Fair. Avijit is represented by Art Heritage, New Delhi.