Living Between Practices & The Poetry of Multiplicity
a reflection
“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you... It means that you do not fall for shallow and easy solutions—it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.” - Adrienne Rich
I often describe myself through a growing list of roles: artist, curator, producer, educator, and artist manager. This isn't a calculated list, but rather a natural reflection of how I navigate the arts – moving through forms, disciplines, institutions, ideas, and people. Early in my career, the boundaries between creating art and thinking about art simply dissolved. I have come to accept that I lead an interwoven life, one that defies a single definition. Each role isn't a departure but an extension of the others. As I complete 13 years working "behind the scenes," I reflect on the permeable spaces between disciplines, roles, and responsibilities. It is about being sustained by multiplicity, by speaking many artistic "languages." Yet, it also involves acknowledging the friction, limitations, and exhaustion that accompany such a life.
Virginia Woolf famously wrote about a room of one's own. I often ponder what it means to inhabit a house of many rooms. The artist in me resides in the room of the body – moving, sensing, remembering. The curator lives in the room of the "other," thinking through context, curation as care, and the choreography of ideas and people. The educator occupies the room of words, dialogue, and doubt. The producer operates in the machine room – holding the structure and navigating systems. And somewhere, quietly, the artist manager tends to the invisible labour that keeps everything cohesive.
Moving between these rooms daily means adjusting to different registers of language, emotion, and pace. It entails understanding intimacy and infrastructure in equal measure, and recognising that choreography can exist on a stage as much as in a spreadsheet. But most of all, it means dissolving the hierarchy between these spaces. The romantic notion of the singular genius creating in solitude has always been a myth, according to me. I have found that wearing multiple hats is not only a strategic adaptation to a precarious ecosystem but also a source of deep nourishment. The movement between roles fosters cross-pollination between disciplines.
To wear many hats isn't just about survival in the fragmented arts economy; it is also an act of refusal. A refusal to be reduced to a single identity, a single practice, a single politics. I am drawn to the porous edges where disciplines blend into one another. The philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant writes about opacity as a right – the right to remain unknowable, to resist transparency. For me, multiplicity is a form of opacity; it insists that we are plural beings, made of entanglements.
The joy of multiplicity lies in its generativity. Cross-medium work has made me more attentive to process, slowing me down and deepening my curiosity. It resists the pressure for constant outputs and deliverables, allowing failure to be generative. A rehearsal can inform a lecture, a teaching session can spark a new work, and a curatorial framework can illuminate a personal question. These acts aren't compartmentalised; they leak into, feed, and transform each other. Multiplicity creates a valuable feedback loop where I have come to prioritise slowness, dialogue, and care. In a world that champions outcomes, deliverables, and visibility, I find myself cherishing small, quiet acts: a conversation that shifts perspective, a student who finds their voice, an artist who feels supported.
This interdependence fosters a unique perspective, bridging the macro and the micro. I understand institutions from the inside, but I also recognise the fragility of individual artistic impulses. This multivalence is powerful, creating space for solidarity, innovation, and reflection. It helps build ecologies rather than silos. Indeed, I view this as an integral part of my artistic labour.
However, multiplicity can easily lead to fragmentation. When every role demands care, attention, and presence, burnout looms. There are moments when I feel stretched too thin, when artistic clarity is lost in a sea of emails, timelines, and meetings. The labour of producing and curating often overshadows the act of creating.
There is also the risk of becoming instrumentalised. Institutions frequently valorise the "multi-hyphenate" as a neoliberal ideal – the adaptable, efficient, always-on worker. The same flexibility that once felt empowering can be weaponised into unpaid labour, boundary-less availability, and burnout. As Sara Ahmed writes in Living a Feminist Life, "The work you do to open the door for others becomes the reason why your own work is not taken seriously." This tension resonates deeply; the more I am seen as a facilitator, the more invisible my own creative work becomes.
Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves." Multiplicity has taught me to live the question, to embrace uncertainty, and to understand that clarity isn't always the goal. Some truths emerge only through practice, not articulation.
I have learned that mastery is a myth, and that failure isn't the opposite of success but a method. To be a good teacher is also to be a learner. To curate is to serve something larger than personal taste. To manage artists is not to control them, but to protect the fragility of their visions. I have also learned that one doesn't have to choose; it is perfectly acceptable to be several things at once. Art isn't a fixed identity; it is a method, a way of being in the world.
I believe the future of artistic practice lies in this entanglement – not in silos of specialisation, but in constellations of care. Multiplicity can be a methodology, not a burden. It can be a way of staying in motion, in dialogue, and in transformation.
If I were to name my method, I might call it weaving. Weaving roles, disciplines, and forms. Weaving people and ideas. Weaving myself back together when I feel frayed. This isn't about multitasking; it is about being porous, about letting the world in, about refusing the tidy boxes capitalism would place us in.
Weaving is also about time. It is slow, demands presence, and honours repetition. In many ways, it is like choreography – a structure for movement, a way to hold contradiction with grace. Multiplicity isn't perfect, nor is it easy. But it is alive. To wear many hats is, perhaps, to reject simplicity. It is to insist on a complex, messy, and deeply alive artistic life. And that, I believe, is something worth nourishing.
beautiful, masoom.