Lavanya Thakur
*1998, Karlsruhe, Germany
Lavanya Thakur (b. New Delhi, India) is an artist of Indian origin based in Germany. Trained as a painter (BFA, College of Art, Delhi; MFA, UMPRUM, Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design Prague), her practice has expanded to include textiles, wood, installation, and video as extensions of painterly thinking into space, movement, and embodied experience. Her work has been exhibited across Europe, and in 2026–27 she will participate in residencies at Résidences Ateliers Vivegnis Internationales (RAVI), Liège, Belgium, and Fundaziun Nairs, Scuol, Switzerland.
Thakur’s work develops through sustained attention and repeated return. Rather than seeking narrative clarity or symbolic resolution, she allows images and materials to hold pressure, interruption, and duration. Bodies in her work are sites where memory, attention, and control are negotiated, not portraits or cultural markers. Working across geographies has sharpened her awareness of how identities are expected to be instantly legible. Rather than treating identity as content, she lets material persistence give rise to meaning. She describes this approach as “acid reflux”: what cannot be assimilated does not vanish but reappears subtly and persistently. Her work enacts this condition through persistence and rejection of closure.
Rejecting conventional narratives of trauma, identity, or cultural representation, Thakur insists on owning identity rather than performing it, preserving complexity, contradiction, and opacity.