Artist Bio
Ilakkiya Mohanraj (b. 2004) is a Tamil artist based in Edinburgh, working across performance, installation, spoken language, and printmaking. Her practice approaches language as material; something spoken, misheard, divided, and unsettling, examining how meaning shifts through gesture, communication, and reception. Working fluidly across disciplines, she brings together performance, text, sound, and everyday imagery to explore attention, presence, and the subtle negotiations of knowledge and power within shared space.
Treating language and sound as material, presence, and object, her performances function as phenomenological records that confront audiences through narration, repetition, and sensory disorientation. Often situated within sculptural installations, the work tests how research questions manifest through live action, bodily experience, and audience interaction.
Her work begins with lived experience and develops through research-led processes engaging memory, cultural inheritance, and systems of knowledge. She is particularly interested in moments of misinterpretation, discomfort, and heightened awareness, and in how these states expose the politics of translation and understanding.
