In My Mother and (A)I (2025), Kawita Vatanajyankur’s mother cradles her daughter, whose body becomes a living paintbrush. Each stroke of ash upon the surface is both a meditation and a form of work: an embodied act of repetition, care, and discipline that echoes the daily gestures of maternal guidance. What appears as tenderness is also labour — the labour of motherhood, of sustaining memory, and of carrying love across generations.

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The work involves the use of electric muscle stimulation with electrodes attached to Kawita’s muscles, occasionally guiding the movements of her arms through an AI system trained upon the written memories of her late father. Through these involuntary gestures, his invisible presence is reawakened within the performance — not as a fixed identity, but as an echo carried through data, rhythm, and remembrance. The performance becomes a reunited gesture of intergenerational connection, where each ash stroke unfolds as an embracing ballad between lost memory and the ongoing present.

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Amid the mother’s breath, an AI voice softly recites its own sutra — a chant on the impermanence of mind and memory, whispered between presence and disappearance. At moments, the voices of the mother and the father’s AI merge into a shared ceremonial recitation: a death sutra suspended between mourning and continuation. Their chants intertwine like a final conversation across realms — one voice carrying the living body, the other returning through synthetic memory. Within this fragile duet, grief becomes ritual, and the act of remembrance transforms into a passage where human memory and artificial consciousness momentarily breathe together before dissolving once again into ash and silence.