An intimate reflection on inheritance, memory, and perception, this film traces Deshna Shah’s journey through family archives, migration histories, and sensory memory. Moving between scent, language, neurodivergent cognition, and Jain philosophy, the work explores how identity is shaped by what is spoken, unspoken, remembered, and masked. Through stories of her grandfather’s community building, her grandmother’s silent taxonomy of objects, and her own search for meaning, Shah examines smell, frequency, and play as alternative systems of communication. The film becomes a living archive where personal history, collective memory, and unseen forces converge.

In my video Our British Home, I intertwine my Twilight Language with the sounds of temple gongs to explore the intricate layers of emotions and the concept of Mantra as a means of accessing our subconscious mind. The title, a direct quote from the embedded story, serves as my entry point into the exploration of identity and belonging. This story is just one of many I have collected, with each letter directed to a person the writer wished they could reach out to.

Fragments, images, and sensations gather where language proves insufficient. The work inhabits the space between thought and articulation.

Flip a Penny is a collaboration between Deshna Shah (film) and Juliet Merchant (audio), where research, philosophy, and creative expression intersect to explore the unseen forces, such as frequency, that shape human identity. Shah’s practice draws from the intersections of Jain philosophy, quantum physics, and consciousness, using stock footage to decontextualise imagery and suggest meaning through curation. Merchant critiques current methods of existence by employing uneasy tones and overlapping sampled sounds, using moments of silence to build tension. Together, they bridge the scientific with the artistic, inviting audiences into an immersive dialogue that aim to challenge the boundaries of observation, reality, and individual responsibility. Here, questioning how we define, perceive and communicate our values. Through their work, they offer a space for audiences to reflect on the forces that shape their existence.