For a long time, multidisciplinary artist Ambika Trasi understood the termite colony as a metaphor for imperialism: invading, consuming, and overtaking. In her first iteration of The Soul of the White Ant, a lecture-performance presented during a residency in Lisbon in 2017, Trasi drew on the social structure of termites to examine Portuguese colonialism and the ways its aesthetics and systems continue to shape Goa, India, a former Portuguese colony where her family traces its ancestry. Years later, she realized the metaphor had failed her.
While revisiting the project, Trasi returned to research on sateri—termite mounds long revered by Indigenous communities in Goa before later becoming absorbed into dominant Hindu practices, a process that reshaped Indigenous sacred sites through caste-based religious authority. She also encountered ecological research that challenged Western understandings of termites themselves. Rather than being destructive pests organized through rigid hierarchies, Trasi learned that termite colonies sustain surrounding ecosystems, resist desertification, and function through decentralized forms of collective intelligence.
This newfound knowledge laid the groundwork for a reconceptualized version of The Soul of the White Ant (2024), reimagined as a video essay that screened at the 2024 Twelve Gates Arts x Philadelphia Asian American Film Foundation (PAAFF) Contemporary Video Art Exhibition. This time, the work traced something intimate: Trasi’s own effort to unlearn inherited ways of seeing.
“It’s tracing the history and the land as much as it’s tracing my own colonized thinking,” she reflects. “There’s so much I don’t know and I’m trying to uncover.”
This willingness to revise her own thinking runs through Trasi’s broader practice. Working across video, digital collage, lecture-performance, printmaking, installation, and sculpture, she investigates how colonial histories continue to shape the stories people tell, the institutions they inherit, and the ways they learn to look at the natural world.
Raised in Metuchen, New Jersey by parents who immigrated from India in the late 1970s, Trasi always knew she wanted to be an artist. “I was always drawing,” she shares. Her family often visited museums, being so close to New York City, where art was treated as an ordinary part of life, even if becoming an artist did not seem like an obvious career. Growing up othered in a predominantly white town, drawing also became a language of its own. “When people are not treating you very well, but then suddenly stop and notice you’re good at art,” she says, “it felt like [having] a weird power.”
As an undergraduate at New York University, Trasi majored in Studio Art and minored in South Asian Studies, concentrating in printmaking while also taking classes in South Asian history, religion, literature, and Hindi. This combination became foundational to her artistic approach. Rather than separating research from artmaking, she found they continuously fed each other. “I think a lot of what I’ve become interested in is thinking about how the residues of colonialism or imperialism are embedded in the everyday objects, products, or sites that we continue to live with,” she shares.
After graduating from NYU, Trasi worked in arts administration while slowly building her own artistic practice. At organizations including the Asia Contemporary Art Forum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, she found herself wearing many hats—curatorial assistant, writer, marketer, web developer—while encountering artists whose research-based practices expanded her understanding of what contemporary art could be.
“I tend to go down rabbit holes,” she says with a laugh.
These rabbit holes often begin with an object, image, or historical curiosity that unfolds into larger questions. Video has become an ideal medium for this kind of inquiry. Without consistent access to a printmaking studio, Trasi adapted, turning to digital collage and sourced footage that she could assemble on a laptop in a small apartment. Lecture-performance offered another way to weave research, speculation, and storytelling together, eventually evolving into video essays that blur the lines between experimental documentary and performance.
“I think this is true for most artists,” she says. “You’re working within the conditions you’re in, whether it’s financial or space or time.”
Pursuing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art at the University of Pennsylvania brought Trasi to Philadelphia. The program allowed her to deepen her knowledge of the history of digital collage and footage films by studying it through practitioners like CAMP, a Mumbai-based artist collective founded in 2007 who led a course at Penn’s Center for Experimental Ethnography during Trasi’s first semester. CAMP is globally known for creating experimental, critical media—transforming everyday surveillance and communication technologies into new tools for storytelling, resistance, and public engagement.
Within her first year of living in Philly, Trasi developed Pillars of Salt, which she presented at Practice Gallery. This installation encompassed the video works Fugue State (2025) and Shikar (2025), marking the first time Trasi blended video and sculpture, exploring how classical Indian dance has been sanitized and repackaged as a nationalist symbol. In Shikar, Trasi juxtaposes archival footage of tiger hunts in colonial India with contemporary conservation efforts surrounding Tipu’s Tiger at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, exposing the uneasy relationship between imperial conquest, museum stewardship, and preservation.
In an earlier video piece, How the Rhinoceros Got Its Skin (2022), Trasi combines personal narrative, film, archival footage, and radio excerpts to examine the rhinoceros’ shifting place in the colonial imagination, tracing how the animal became a symbol of empire, wealth, and power, as it grew increasingly endangered in the natural world. “I’m interested in how animals exist in the imagination more than in our daily lives, because we’re so cut off from the natural world—and how that relates to colonization,” she shares.
Trasi continued exploring these questions in Juggernaut (2026), the central work for her culminating MFA thesis. At its center is a sculptural Wurlitzer organ transformed into a hybrid structure inspired by a Jagannath processional cart. Drawing on the story of Amala and Kamala—”feral girls” from Midnapore who were supposedly raised by wolves after being abandoned by their families—the installation examines anthropocentrism, colonial violence, and the possibility of kinship between human and nonhuman life.
Throughout her practice, Trasi returns to the inherited systems that teach us how boundaries function—to rank, classify, and separate the world around us. Her work asks what becomes possible when those boundaries begin to dissolve. Nowhere is this inquiry more evident than in the evolution of The Soul of the White Ant, a work that expanded alongside Trasi’s own changing understanding of ecology, spirituality, and colonial history.
The shift began years before the video essay. While traveling in Goa in 2016, Trasi visited a temple dedicated to Shantadurga (the most common form of the Hindu goddess Durga worshiped in Goa, as well as some parts of Karnataka) that had been rebuilt after Portuguese destruction. Behind the Shantadurga idol stood a termite mound. When she learned that termite mounds had long been sacred sites for Indigenous communities in the region before later being incorporated into Hindu worship, she realized that what she had initially understood as a symbol of colonial occupation revealed another history—one that complicated not only Portuguese colonialism, but also caste, religious appropriation, and Indigenous erasure.
“Despite powerful Vedic and Brahmanical influences, many sites of worship dedicated to the aniconic form of the termitary still survive. On its own, the termitary still represents ecological magic, resisting human intervention or claim,” Trasi explains in the video essay. She became fascinated by the ecological role of termites: transforming dead plant matter into nutrients, creating habitats for countless other species, and resisting desertification through intricate underground networks. Scientists increasingly describe termite colonies as decentralized organisms operating collectively—a model that unexpectedly resonated with Trasi’s interest in mutual aid, as well as frameworks for community organizing outside of institutional thinking.
The Soul of the White Ant ultimately asks viewers to reconsider more than termites. It questions the assumptions embedded within Western systems of classification—the impulse to label certain species as pests, certain plants as weeds, or certain forms of knowledge as primitive. Indigenous understandings of the termite mound, Trasi suggests, offer another way of relating to the natural world, one that refuses to place humans above everything else.
In the video essay, she ponders aloud, “When I think about the ravages of the white ant, I think of the termite bitten pages one might find in a book—the paths eliminating parts of the text, rendering it only partially legible. Instead of simply considering this absence as a loss, how might we consider it as a pathway or a portal?”
Looking ahead, Trasi has a new work that will be featured in an upcoming group exhibition at PS122 Gallery in New York from August 7-30, 2026. Visit ambikatrasi.com to stay up to date with her latest work.
*Featured Image: Image of Ambika Trasi in her studio, standing in front of her work-in-progress “Juggernaut.” Photo credit: Micah Barrett.
Sophia Pradhan is a Malayali American artist and arts administrator whose writing explores film at the intersection of cognition, futurism, and speculative imagination. She is especially drawn to cinema that centers memory and ancestral knowledge to envision liberatory futures, with a focus on South Asian and diasporic filmmakers. Sophia is a 2026 cinéSPEAK Philly Cultural Critics Fellow.
