Rujuta Rao’s practice spans sculpture, installation, book art, beverage, and social practice, alongside conceptual and functional garments under the company RUGA. Research-driven and personal, her work uses material investigation to explore migration, place, family history, and hospitality. Rao activates artworks and publications as sites for communal gathering. Drawing from her training as a bartender and Japanese sake adviser, she stages relational encounters mediated by a menu of artist books and beverages, shared across the bar counter, conceived as both boundary and interface. She considers conditional, unconditional, parasitic, and mutualistic guest–host relations as frameworks for approaching borders and migration. In a moment of geopolitical precarity, her portable, modular architectures explore how hospitality might render boundaries porous.

-From the artist’s website