Ames Yavuz announces representation of Monica Rani Rudhar
12 Mar 2026
Ames Yavuz is pleased to announce the representation of Monica Rani Rudhar.
Based on Gadigal land (Sydney, Australia) and working across sculpture, video, and performance, Rani Rudhar’s practice explores longing and loss tied to cultural identity, drawing on intergenerational family stories to imagine alternate futures. Born to Indian and Romanian migrant parents, the first-generation Australian’s work examines cultural conformity, commodification, and essentialisation within a settler colonial context. Through an auto-ethnographic lens, she reclaims fragmented oral histories to restore familial rituals and resist cultural erasure.
Monica Rani Rhudar, the fire in me was lit long ago, 2026, three-channel video installation, 8 minutes, Still 1
Jewellery and heirlooms are key within Rani Rudhar’s practice as repositories of inherited memory and tangible links to cultural homelands and family members who have passed. These intimate objects carry stories of migration, love, loss and belonging. By recreating palm-sized family adornments as large-scale totems, she gives physical form to family history. Crafted in painstaking detail from terracotta and gilded in lavish gold lustre, their materiality echoes the fragile, yet enduring nature of the stories imparted through objects when exchanged between the hands of generations.
Monica Rani Rhudar, the fire in me was lit long ago, 2026, three-channel video installation, 8 minutes, Still 2
Rani Rudhar is incuded in the 25th Biennale of Sydney opening on 14 March 2026. Her three-channel video work, ‘The fire in me was lit long ago’ delves into the artist’s own familial history to interrogate the legacies of resistance and endurance she has inherited. Central to this work is the story of the artist’s grandfather, Ram Parkash, a freedom fighter for Indian Independence in 1940s Punjab.
Rani Rudhar graduated from a Bachelor of Arts Honors, First Class, UNSW Art & Design, and has exhibition across Australia and internationally including The 25th Biennale of Sydney: Rememory (2026); Makers Space, Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney, Australia (2025); Waiting Room, Gallery 27, Kochi, India (2025); Mud to Masterpiece, Maitland Regional Gallery, Maitland, Australia (2025); Kerameikos, Chau Chak Wing Museum, Sydney, Australia (2024) and Primavera: Young Australian Artists, The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia (2024).
Her work is held in major public and private collections, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artbank, and Blacktown Arts. She has also completed significant commissions for Casula Powerhouse and the Powerhouse Museum. Recent accolades include the 2023 Gosford Emerging Art Prize and the 2025 acquisitive Blacktown City Art Prize.
Rani Rhudar will present a series of ceramic sculptures at Art Basel Hong Kong this month.