The Floral Summit, 2024

Shruti Parekh’s (b. 2000) practice re-examines the circulation of mass-produced objects within late capitalist economies. While these objects are typically stripped of cultural value and relegated to landfills, storage units, or forgotten corners, Parekh reframes them as active participants in new systems of meaning. Her practice employs methodologies of collection, assemblage, diorama-building, stop-motion animation, and photography to create speculative environments where the disposable and the valued, the organic and the artificial, the sacred and the profane coexist. Parekh explores how discarded commodities can be reimagined as generative materials — opening new speculative, ecological, and affective futures beyond capitalist logics of waste.

Play and fabulation are central strategies in her work. Play functions as both form and method, disrupting rigid interpretations and allowing materials to exceed their immediate use. Fabulation, drawing on speculative fiction and post-structural narratives, generates alternative histories and possible futures around discarded objects. By foregrounding instability, fragmentation, and ambiguity, her constructed environments resist closure and invite open-ended readings of social and ecological possibilities.

Parekh holds a Master of Fine Art at Shiv Nadar University (2023–25) and a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (MSU), Vadodara (2022), where she was awarded the Gold Medal for academic excellence. Her recent exhibitions include the ART800 Degree Show at Shiv Nadar University (Greater Noida, 2025), the Degree Show at MSU Baroda (Vadodara, 2022), Another Brick in the Wall (MSU Baroda, Vadodara, 2022), and the Nasreen Mohamedi Scholarship Display (Vadodara, 2022). Alongside her studio practice, Parekh has worked with curatorial and production teams at the India Art Fair (New Delhi, 2023) and Serendipity Arts Festival (Panaji, 2022), experiences that have informed her understanding of exhibition-making as a site of dialogue and circulation.