How Priyanka Pulijal Uses ConTempoRary ArT to Open ConVersaTions on the AfterlifE
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 11 hours ago
What does the afterlife look like, and how can it be approached through contemporary art? These are questions that shape Priyanka Pulijal’s practice. Drawing from the concept of the Lokas, realms described in Vedic cosmology as layered planes of existence, her work engages with the afterlife as something expansive rather than singular.
Working with form, texture, and composition, the ideas unfold in a way that resists fixed interpretation. What emerges is not a single conclusion, but a space where meaning can shift, shaped by the viewer’s own perspective and experience.
In this interview, we explore how she works within the space between the seen and the unseen, the known and the imagined, and how her approach to contemporary art opens up conversations on the afterlife, perception, and the many layers of human experience.
Q: Let’s start with a fun icebreaker: If your mood today were a Loka, which one would it be and why.
A: Jana Loka. It’s a plane of liberated beings who travel at the speed of thought and live for billions of years. It feels like my present. With everything happening in the world right now, I feel like I’ve already lived several lifetimes before lunch. I still remember hearing Ace of Base’s “The Sign” on the radio for the first time, that specific static, that specific afternoon, and somehow that memory lives in the same brain that’s now trying to process 2026 in real time. I time-jump constantly. Context, history, news headlines, imagined futures, half-remembered pasts. I’m not just living one life linearly. I’m running multiple timelines simultaneously and somehow still showing up to things.
Q: Can you tell us a little about your background and how you came to be an artist.
A: I’m based in LA now, East Coast born and raised, which I think permanently installed a certain dramatic intensity in me that the sunshine here has never fully dissolved. My background lives in creative direction; the visual has always been my first language. But the art arrived differently than the career did. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment. It wasn’t a lightning bolt, more like a slow frequency that kept getting louder and louder. At some point, I started having what I can only describe as spiritual visions: ideas too big and too strange to just sit with quietly or forget. They needed to become things. Objects. Images. Something you could stand in front of. Once I realized I couldn’t stop thinking about visualizing these concepts into reality, I stopped fighting it and just called myself an artist. The journey kind of claimed me.
Q: When you began questioning spirituality, were you searching for truth, or were you searching for yourself.
A: Neither or both, in a way that makes this question beautiful. I think I was searching for the occurrence of multiple truths and the existence of multiple selves. Spirituality in the singular never quite fit. It felt too tidy for what I was experiencing. I have felt many types of hell within me and recognized them in the world. I have felt many types of heaven within me and recognized those too. What fascinated me, and what still fascinates me, is how two people can come from the same family, the same block, the same background, and walk away carrying entirely different universes inside them. They lived next to each other and lived completely different truths. So the real search was about the relationship between self and truth: where those lines blur, where they converge, and whether they were ever actually two separate things to begin with.
Q: These realms have rarely been visualized publicly. What responsibility did you feel in bringing them to life through your art.
A: A deep responsibility and also a kind of itch I genuinely could not scratch any other way. The scarcity of visualizations around the Lokas was both the mystery and the invitation. I’d seen interpretations here and there, but never a body of work that sat with the worlds themselves and said, let’s actually look at these. Let’s acknowledge them. And the descriptions, they’re simultaneously so defined and so abstract. So beautiful and so genuinely confusing. That tension felt important to honor rather than resolve. The Vedas hold an incredible complexity, and I felt a responsibility not to flatten it, not to make it digestible in a way that strips it of its strangeness. It needed to be visualized.
Q: How do you ensure that your visualizations invite curiosity rather than impose a definitive interpretation.
A: This is the central grapple, and I don’t think it ever fully resolves, which might be the point? As I studied the Lokas and sat with how little they’d been visualized, I kept wrestling with the line between depicting and interpreting. Do I show you the description exactly as written? Or do I show you how it felt to me, the sensation of reading it, the world it opened up in my body? It’s the same tension as truth versus self, showing up again in the studio. I think about it like this: if you were introducing an apple to someone who had never seen one, do you just draw the shape? Or do you draw the feeling of biting into it, the cold, the tart and sweet, the give of the skin, the slight pressure in your teeth? One tells you what it is. The other invites you inside it. I’m always trying to make the second kind of work. Something you step into rather than just look at.
Q: In what ways has your spiritual journey reshaped your expectations of intimacy, connection, or partnership.
A: My first instinct when things got hard was always to run. Shut the door, create distance, go quiet. I’m still guilty of it, ask anyone close to me, they’ll confirm. But I think underneath the running was something more specific than fear of conflict. It was the fear of being found out. Of showing up as something that didn’t meet expectations, or worse, being deeply misunderstood. Vulnerability with people I loved felt like an exposure risk, not a bridge. My spiritual journey shifted something fundamental in that. I started recognizing different hells and heavens within myself first and realized I wasn’t a neat set of boxes. I was spaghetti. Tangled, plural, impossible to fully separate. My light is dark and my dark is light. They were never opposites living in different rooms, they were always the same room, the same plate, completely mixed together. So now I’m practicing. Practicing displaying my inner hells with a little more grace and turning down the volume on performing my inner heavens. Because the performance is the distance. And the mess, the darkness, the ugly, that’s not the obstacle to intimacy. That is the intimacy. Q: Fill in the blank: The afterlife feels like walking into Yourself.
By engaging with ideas of the afterlife through contemporary art, Priyanka Pulijal’s practice doesn’t aim to arrive at fixed conclusions, but instead stays close to what remains unspoken, intangible, and often difficult to fully define. Rather than resolving these ideas, the work holds them in a space where they can be considered from different angles, shaped by memory, perception, and individual experience. In doing so, it creates room for a quieter kind of engagement, one that allows meaning to emerge gradually rather than all at once.
To see more of Priyanka Pulijal's incredible work and stay updated on her latest projects, be sure to follow her on Instagram and visit her website!
Disclaimer:
The views, opinions, and perspectives expressed by artists featured, interviewed, or presented on this site are solely those of the respective individuals. They do not necessarily reflect the views, beliefs, or opinions of Selfless Art Gallery, its staff, or affiliates.
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