Beautiful Workings
Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan, Beautiful Workings, 2025
Can the language of quantum physics help explain the complexity of human identity and emotion?
When poet Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan first learned about superposition, she felt that she finally had the right language to explain how her migrant and other identities all co-existed within her. She interviewed quantum physicists who identified as migrants to see if they made similar connections between their research and sense of identity. Instead of a clear answer, Chandrika found stories that danced between disciplines, defying expectations and confronting assumptions. Her resulting installation is a love letter to both the scientific and artistic research processes, encompassing poems, images, notes and memories which map her journey through the world of quantum.
Poet Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan has created a multimedia portrait of her artist residency hosted at Science Gallery London in autumn 2024. Part of the Studio Quantum programme led by the Goethe Institute, Chandrika focussed her residency on connections between migrant experience and quantum physics, interviewing academics and researchers from migrant backgrounds about whether they saw connections between quantum ideas and the experience of being from two places at once. Her installation brings together audio recordings of some of the poems she wrote during the residency with images, notes and memories which map her artistic research process.
Since 2022 Chandrika has been the recipient of multiple Arts Council of Ireland Awards, one of which supported her being the 2023 Writer in Residence for the Institute of Physics. In 2024 Chandrika was selected as a Goethe-Institut Studio Quantum Artist in Residence working with King’s Quantum and Science Gallery London and is currently under commission with Skein Press as part of the Play It Forward Fellowship.
Beautiful Workings was developed as part of Studio Quantum, a quantum artist-in-residence programme by Goethe-Institut London in partnership with King’s College London and Science Gallery London.