Masala Who Art in Heaven

Sculptural Installation (2025)

Mixed-media installation artwork featuring rows of South Asian spice packets mounted vertically onto patterned textile fabric beneath a small wall-mounted crucifix.

Sculptural installation + Ritual object

Materials: Commercial spice packaging, wax fabric, crucifix, turmeric. 

Dimensions: Variable.

A caste-coded altar confronting purity politics, Christian aesthetics, and diaspora grocery aisles.

This didn’t begin as an artwork.
It began in a corner shop—where saffron spice boxes whispered purity, and god sat above the barcode.

We noticed the overlaps:
Colonial packaging styled like Christian altars.
Caste-coded ingredients in gospel fonts.
The holy and the harmful sharing the same shelf.

This is about taste and the systems that decide who gets to have it.

Premiered at Art Basel 2025, Masala Who Art in Heaven turns spice boxes into a shrine disguised as a spice rack — where caste reveals itself between the aisles.

Portrait of Jonah Batambuze standing before an installation of South Asian spice packaging and patterned textile exploring migration, ritual, and diasporic identity.
Close-up of Jonah Batambuze examining altered spice packaging mounted on patterned textile within an installation about diaspora, consumption, and ritual.

Rituals travel.
So do hierarchies.

Jonah Batambuze adjusting a crucifix above hanging South Asian spice packaging within an installation exploring religion, migration, and colonial residue.

Food remembers

what systems try to erase.

Close-up of a hand releasing yellow spice powder onto a gallery floor as part of an installation exploring ritual, residue, and diasporic memory.

Since its presentation, the work has moved beyond the installation into public space—circulating through food cultures, audiences, and discourse.

What appears as packaging is now being read, questioned, and contested in real time.

Masala Who Art in Heaven
(with studies)

What began within the installation now continues through a series of material studies using food packaging.

These works isolate the object—surface, containment, naming—revealing how hierarchy moves through everyday materials.

Not as symbol, but as system.

Package of Brahmins turmeric powder with spilled spice residue beneath the packaging, referencing caste, purity, branding, and consumption.
Box of Brahmins pickle powder packaging marked with puncture holes, referencing caste, purity, consumption, and diasporic branding.
Box of Eastern Brahmin Sambar Powder bound with rope, referencing caste, ritual, purity, and diasporic food branding.
Jar of Brahmins sliced mango pickle photographed as part of a conceptual artwork exploring caste, branding, migration, and diasporic food culture.

Texts

How Caste is Branded as Taste in the Global Spice Aisle
Goya Journal

—> read

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