In this blog, Bishwadhan Rai —Sainsbury Scholar at the BSR from September to December 2025—shares reflections on his residency experience and the research he presented at the December 2025 Winter Open Studios.
Anthea Hamilton: “I’m literally thinking about monasteries and convents here: I romanticise that there’s kind of a decadence to that life because it’s so set. Like, you’re in a state of constant focus and holding oneself on a limit of rapture for even the smallest decisions or acts. You are close to the edges all the time. Hormonally, it must be a really extreme space”
I came to Rome on a search. Trying to live, breathe and work to locate the pulse. To find the feeling that comes from a restless state.
It was inevitable since I work in feelings. That I try to have a complete understanding of emotional habits. To reflect upon.
Certain forms, materials, motifs keep haunting me. As I walked around Rome, Turin, Pompeii and Naples, my body had a restless desire to record it, to make a portrait of.
Consumption of: alcohol, fags, sleep, sex, emotions, joy, melancholy, restlessness, energy, intensity, ambition, pleasure, work.
My basic needs are being fulfilled. I do not need to worry about cooking, cleaning, money, or a home. I only need to worry about work.
How do I keep making? Not what or why but how?
Even though my needs are being met I cannot seem to understand certain habits, certain desires. These mysterious urges are valid as much as the ones I have words for.
Trying to hold, and to be held, but constantly falling apart.
In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin criticises the linear. The heroes story, fiction as something triumphant and tragic. Stories represented by weapons, by violence.
Instead Le Guin was interested in the story of the holder, and a recipient. Stories represented by vessels, by life.
Trying to gather.
To believe in the anticlimax.
