Vivek Vilasini’s wide-ranging practice spans photography, installation, sculpture, and ecological interventions. Deeply invested in questions of identity, translation, and belonging, his work explores how cultural meaning migrates across geographies and media. Drawing from political history, environmental systems, and personal memory, Vilasini constructs intricate visual vocabularies that resist easy classification.

At the heart of Vilasini’s practice lies a sustained inquiry into the evolution of identity—seen not as fixed, but as constantly negotiated through everyday social practices, collective memory, and shifting contexts. Through photography, he challenges the idea of the image as a neutral document. Instead, his photographs operate as visual hypertexts—composite fields of meaning where absence, translation, and subjectivity intersect. Local histories, social rituals, and cultural dislocations surface in layered narratives that combine formal precision with conceptual depth.

Vilasini first gained prominence in the late 1990s while based in the UAE, where he was part of a seminal cohort of contemporary artists that included Hassan Sharif, Mohammed Kazem, Abdullah Al Saadi, and Ibrahim. During this period of intense artistic experimentation, he exhibited sculptural and conceptual works at the Sharjah Museum, Alliance Française, and multiple editions of the Sharjah Biennale. These early explorations laid the foundation for his enduring interest in cross-cultural dialogue and alternative modernities.

He is perhaps best known for works that examine identity as an osmotic process—shaped simultaneously by rootedness and rupture. His 2008 photographic series Between One Shore and Several Others uses mimicry, reflection, and fragmentation to comment on ideological constructs and shifting political landscapes. Translation, in Vilasini’s work, becomes both method and metaphor—whether through opposition, assimilation, or naturalization.