SRESTHA CHAKRABORTY
- Lucie Blaze
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Artist-Researcher, PhD Candidate
Can science measure something artists have claimed for centuries?
Not whether a painting is beautiful, or whether someone enjoys a museum visit, but whether art can genuinely shift the way we perceive ourselves and one another. It is a question that sits at the heart of Srestha's practice, bringing together disciplines that are rarely found in the same conversation: cognitive psychology, neuroscience, visual art, music and decolonial research.
For Srestha, these worlds have never felt separate. Trained in human physiology, forensic science and cognitive psychology, while maintaining a practice as a visual artist, calligrapher and singer, they move easily between studio and laboratory. One way of working informs the other. Art raises the questions; research offers another way of approaching them.
Today, as a PhD candidate at the University of Vienna's ARTIS Lab (Art Research on Transformation of Individuals and Societies), Srestha investigates one of the most enduring assumptions about art: its capacity to transform us.
As a DOC Fellowship awardee funded by the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Austrian Academy of Sciences), their current research explores whether encounters with visual art can influence attitudes towards migrant communities, including refugees and asylum seekers. It is an ambitious question, particularly at a time when public conversations around migration are becoming increasingly polarised. Srestha approaches the subject empirically, using longitudinal experience sampling and behavioural methods to observe how people engage with artworks over time. Their research implications are also concurrent with several of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), namely, SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being, SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities, and SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions.
The setting is as important as the method. Participants encounter artworks in museums and galleries, but also in their own homes, allowing the research to move beyond controlled laboratory environments. What happens when someone spends a month living with an artwork? Does the experience continue to unfold after leaving an exhibition? Which responses disappear, and which quietly remain?
The artworks themselves are created by migrant artists from India, Arun Kumar Mondal (he/him) and Pakistan, Farhatulain Kiani (she/her) (@farhatulainkiani), and engage directly with experiences of migration, identity and displacement. For Srestha, this choice is more than a research design. Having moved from India to Vienna in 2023, they understand migration not simply as a topic of study but as lived experience. That perspective shapes the research from the ground up.
Instead of treating migrant communities as subjects to be observed, the project adopts a decolonial, intersectional and trauma-informed approach, developed in dialogue with the artists and communities involved. The emphasis is on collaboration and co-creation rather than extraction, recognising that questions about representation cannot be separated from questions about power.
This commitment to complexity and nuance runs throughout Srestha's work. Their research belongs to the emerging field of social neuroaesthetics, which investigates how aesthetic experiences influence emotions, behaviour and social understanding. While much existing research asks whether art affects empathy or prejudice, Srestha is interested in a more nuanced set of questions. Under what conditions does transformation happen? Who is most likely to experience it? And how can researchers study something as deeply personal as an encounter with art without reducing it to a set of numbers?
The challenge, they suggest, is not to eliminate complexity but to work with it. Every viewer brings a different history into the gallery. Memory, culture, identity, lived experience and emotion all shape how an artwork is encountered. Rather than treating these differences as statistical noise, Srestha sees them as the very material research needs to understand. The goal is not to prove that art changes everyone in the same way, but to investigate why the same artwork might resonate profoundly with one person while leaving another untouched.
Their artistic practice reflects a similar sensibility.
Working across mixed media, figurative and abstract illustrations, calligraphy, and poetry, Srestha creates quiet, contemplative works that invite sustained attention rather than immediate interpretation. Looking through their work, it becomes clear that the artist and the researcher are asking similar questions. Both are interested in what happens beneath the surface of attention, in experiences that resist instant explanation.
That curiosity extends beyond the studio and the laboratory. Through Artivist's Journal, an independent platform exploring the intersections of art, activism and research, Srestha creates space for conversations. The project reflects the same interdisciplinary thinking that runs throughout their own practice, bringing together artists, researchers and activists around shared questions about creativity, social justice and lived experience.
Srestha also describes themselves as a disabled and neuroqueer artist-researcher, a perspective that informs their work and the questions they choose to ask. They don’t see different cognitive experiences as deviations from a norm, they see them as valuable ways of expanding how we think about perception, aesthetics and knowledge itself. Whose experience becomes the standard against which all others are measured? And what might we discover if we began from difference instead?
These questions feel increasingly relevant within a cultural landscape marked by growing social division and political polarisation. Srestha's research does not suggest that art offers simple solutions to these challenges. Instead, it asks whether aesthetic experience can create brief moments in which habitual ways of seeing begin to loosen, allowing curiosity to replace certainty, even temporarily.
For centuries, artists have argued that art changes people. Audiences have described leaving exhibitions feeling moved, unsettled or transformed, while museums have struggled to articulate those experiences in language that extends beyond personal testimony. Srestha isn't trying to replace those stories with data. They're asking whether science can learn to recognise them.
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