A multidisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher, Cheriese Dilrahj maintains an experimental practice concerned with incubating queries, questions, and concerns, working through them as a means of understanding. “Sometimes I am thinking through something and making is how I mark this process,” she explains. “You can arrive at meaning afterwards. I don’t move with the intention of what something is supposed to be. I’m constantly trying to arrive at understanding.”
Currently featured in Between Us & the Stars, a group exhibition at BKhz in Johannesburg, Dilrahj’s work emphasizes the importance of non-verbal forms of expression in articulating emotions and histories that defy conventional language. Her approach is not only intellectually rigorous but also deeply evocative, engaging with the resonances of identity, migration, and transformation.
Dilrahj’s artistic journey is shaped by her layered heritage as a South African of Indian descent, which she explores with nuance and introspection. Her dissertation, Navigating the African-Indian Sea as a Site of Reworlding in South Africa’s Post-1994 Era, serves as both a conceptual and poetic foundation for much of her work. Through this lens, she examines the historical entanglements of the Indian Ocean, a space that carried her ancestors through indentured labor and continues to inform her identity today.
For Dilrahj, the ocean is both a physical and metaphorical site. It embodies the merging of cultures, the trauma of displacement, and the possibilities of reimagining fractured histories. In What the Seas Brought, a piece on display at BKhz, she transforms sari and resin into a textured landscape that shifts between sea and hills, a liminal space that blurs boundaries. “I wanted to create something magical—a figure that’s mysterious, where you’re not sure if it’s hills or seas,” she reflects. The piece is imbued with maternal imagery, echoing Pumla Gqola’s invocation of African women carrying metaphorical mountains, a burden of history and resilience that defines Dilrahj’s understanding of identity.
This exploration of hybridity is central to her work. Dilrahj describes her identity as a convergence of worlds—one shaped by her South African upbringing and the ancestral ties that connect her to India, a place she has never visited but continues to feel through memory and history. “As much as people lost elements of their original culture through displacement, they also became something else,” she says. This transformation is woven into her practice, as she reclaims fragmented histories through the materiality of textiles, video, and sound.
One of her most striking works, a woven map made of saris, captures this interconnection. By cutting and weaving the fabric into an aerial view, she evokes the intricate links between diasporic identities. “For me, it’s a way of visualizing how we’re separate but interlinked,” she explains. “If you remove one thread, everything starts to unravel. That’s how I think about history—how unaddressed injustices resurface in the present.”
Dilrahj’s focus on inherited trauma, particularly within the context of indentured labor, brings a poignant depth to her work. She reflects on the constrained lives of women in her family, many of whom were relegated to caregiving and labor roles. “I often think about what it would have been like if my mother had the freedom to choose what she wanted to be,” she says. This question of self-determination informs much of her creative process, where making becomes a form of both reflection and healing.
Her practice also integrates her background as a writer and researcher, blending theoretical inquiry with sensory experiences. For Dilrahj, the choice of medium is instinctive but intentional. “Writing gave me clarity on how to translate my ideas into visual work,” she notes. “But what I love about using multiple mediums—sound, video, textiles—is that they speak to the same ideas in different ways, creating layers of meaning.”
Durban, where the Indian Ocean meets South Africa’s eastern coast, often serves as a focal point in her work. “Durban is such a fascinating place for me—it carries so much trauma,” she explains. “The ways of being that are responses to that trauma are passed down from generation to generation.” She sees the city as a microcosm of broader post-colonial complexities, where unresolved histories resurface cyclically, as seen in the echoes of the 1985 and 2021 riots.
Yet, for Dilrahj, these histories also hold the seeds of reworlding—a process of imagining new possibilities beyond the fractures of the past. Inspired by Arundhati Roy’s words, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing,” Dilrahj sees her work as part of a broader communal effort to reimagine what the future can hold. “Reworlding is not just an artistic endeavor—it’s something that requires collective action,” she emphasizes.
Through her layered and experimental practice, Cheriese Dilrahj invites us to sit with the complexities of history, identity, and transformation. Her work does not offer easy resolutions but instead opens up spaces for dialogue and introspection. By weaving together the past and the present, the personal and the political, Dilrahj creates a body of work that is as intellectually compelling as it is emotionally resonant—a quiet yet profound act of reworlding.