KAWITA VATANAJYANKUR
MY MOTHER AND AI
บั ง สุ กุ ล จั ก ร ก ล
Memory Machine Series
In My Mother and (A)I (2025), 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.
The work involves the use of electric muscle stimulation with electrodes attached to Kawita’s muscles, occasionally guiding her arms’ movements by the AI trained on the written memory of her late father, igniting his invisible presence. The performance becomes a reunited gesture of the intergenerational connection where the ash stokes becomes an embracing ballad of lost memory and ongoing present.
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.
This work is commissioned by Yuz Museum in Shanghai, China.
My Mother and AI, 4K Video, 2025
Duration: 9.44 Minutes
Edition of 4+3 AP
In permanent collection of YUZ Museum
ABOUT THE SERIES
In ‘Memory Machine’ series, Kawita Vatanajyankur transforms her body into the traditional tools and instruments that produce meditative sounds of impermanence or embody tensions between hold and release. Expanding from her ‘Cyber Labour’ series, Vatanajyankur furthers her artistic research into a new approach, asking whether AI can serve as a symbiotic medium and labor for emotional transformation. Can memory be reanimated through the physical body? Rooted in collaboration with her mother (Pam Vatanajyankur), ‘Memory Machine’ is a generational exploration of loss, ritual and memory.