Howareyoufeeling.studio

Howareyoufeeling.studio began as an extension of founders Neil Balser and Doyel Joshi’s wedding, but has since grown into a practice that moves fluidly between art, design, installation, sound and film. Veering away from being bound to a particular medium, the studio responds to the site, people, context and questions surrounding each project. Their process is equally introspective, often beginning with something they are reckoning with personally before finding a material or form through which to explore it. This approach is particularly evident in Provenance, an ice installation at IF.BE, which began with a simple observation about the former ice factory and evolved through an encounter with its original owners. For Neil and Doyel, chance and mystique are as much a part of the process as research and collaboration. Now, as new parents, they are also beginning to consider how this new role might find its way into the work they make together.
 
Could you give me a short trip down memory lane and explain how the studio came to be? And also, why is it called How Are You Feeling?
Doyel and I had separate practices. We met in New York, where we both studied at Parsons, and then worked together on her thesis project for the first time, which was a film. We had a performance piece in it, and I did the sound and performance direction. She studied fashion, and then we brought it all together in a project. Since then, we’ve been working together on all kinds of projects.  For our wedding, we wanted to create a space for different people who come together from all our connections. There were people from New York, queer folks, very traditionally leaning conservative people from villages in Rajasthan, very Bengali aunties, and people from Germany. How do you get them together in the light of connection or love?

Instead of spending the decoration budget on decoration, we said we would use it to create installations or something that felt personal to us. Our wedding website at the time was called HowAreYou Feeling.Marriage? Instead of calling it something cliche, we felt like the website should ask ‘how are you feeling’, where everybody just taps into who they are and how they feel in the moment. The wedding was picked up by Vogue and got an eight-page spread. That became Howareyoufeeling.studio, and a lot of people contacted us for work. I think the first person who reached out was Gursi from Lovebirds!

Since then, we’ve been doing many projects. People still contact us and say, ‘We saw your wedding, can you do XYZ for us?’ Then, we showed at India Art Fair because it’s an art studio and we have an art practice. Things have just continued from there on.

There’s a lot of intersectionality in your practice. It ranges across art, design and installation, as well as public and interactive installations. It doesn’t really fall within a singular, broad label. Why is it important to situate your practice in this intersection?
I don’t think the idea was ever to make the practice pluralistic or medium agnostic in that sense. I think what the practice is, is a response to a certain site, a certain context, a certain set of people, a certain set of questions, a certain situation, a certain place that we are in our life too.
Each project is a response, hopefully as honestly as possible, to the different set of circumstances that the space, the people, the people that are curating it, the collaboration between Neil and I, where we are in our relationship in that given moment in time, and what topics we are dealing with.
In a way, the wedding became a blueprint for us of how to create a process because an Indian wedding is so heavy in its emotional landscape, especially one that is inter-cultural. It brings up so much primal shit for everyone involved that you are almost forced to reckon with your own point of view and stand up for what you believe in.

I’m not saying that we know exactly what it is that we want to say always, and we know exactly what the perfect set of circumstances or what the perfect world is. But I suppose the one that we are trying to build is the one that we’re trying to live in. The wedding gave us such a rich set of circumstances to deal with emotionally and in ourselves, and also with other people who love you and want to support you, but come with their own set of ways with which they see the world.

That process gave us a blueprint of how we approach almost any project. The medium is dictated by the certain set of circumstances and context that each project presents. Of course, we’re attracted to certain ways of expression. We love large scale, and I do think that that is one medium in which we communicate. Colour is another medium in which we communicate. Our latest project is actually a film or a set of films which is not out yet. Neil and I were just reflecting on it over the weekend. It has a large-scale installation, but the final medium in which it is going to be released is through a video format, which is a first for us in a way. It keeps it exciting.

Could you tell me a little bit about your creative process? How does something go from an idea in your head, or somebody approaching you for a collaboration, to a real-life, material project?
A material project is always linked to an inner emotional process or an inner reckoning; something that we go through together and individually, and that we share with each other. Usually, the deeper we go and the more honest we are with each other, the more we find that we’re able to create a strong project out of it. In materiality, I think that’s an observation where we feel like, ‘Oh, we just went through something, and look at this project that resonates.’

It’s very much about our partnership, about how we communicate, about what goes on within ourselves and with each other. Then, that somehow seems to resonate with an audience because they live in the same world. They have the same senses of observation of the world, which then allows them to connect to things that we also are feeling.  If things resonate with us, chances are that it resonates with other people.

Of all the projects you’ve worked on, whether it’s something you worked on for the sa Ladakh Biennale, India Art Fair, or your wedding, is there one project that really captures the essence of what you’re trying to communicate through your work?
I think the practice itself is the juice. It sounds very diplomatic, but the truth is that I feel like each project has its own. We find something about ourselves in it, and so it’s delicious in different ways. The process is mainly an introspection of, ‘Okay, how do I really feel about this, and how would I really like to deal with the space, the anger, the people, the relationship?’ Whatever is born out of that is then just the truth of that moment, hopefully. Not always, but hopefully.

That being said, my personal favourite, just because it was a very simple moment that illustrates our process, was when we did Provenance, which is an ice installation, for the first time at IF.BE. It was maybe our second or third project, very early on in the studio. We thought about the name of the site, which was Ice Factory Ballard Estate. There was a moment where Neil said, ‘It almost feels like we can see these channels in that architectural space.’ It’s a really beautiful space that is now recreated for events and things like that. It felt like there were these channels where water could drain through.

It was really an observation of the space, and he said, ‘Let’s just bring ice back into the space,’ because that is what it was. It was an ice factory. That is what the space needs. I responded by saying, ‘Oh, great! I can already visualise it. Let’s make a very large, 10-by-10-foot ice block that melts over the course of the event.’ Then, what happened was that we kind of peeped through around the site itself. The original ice factory has a small window office at the back of the building. It’s super small, which used to be the whole office.

We went to them and said, ‘Will you produce ice blocks with us?’ We didn’t know anything about ice. There was this chance encounter with the original owners of this space, which had then been pushed aside as just part of urban development, where an ice factory was no longer needed and moved outside of the city. But they still had an office, and they still had the previous generations who had the emotional attachment to that place as their own but had to let it go. We met the owners of the original ice factory, and that became the research of the work. How did they feel? Why did they feel the way that they feel? How do they feel about it being changed now? Has it affected their business? What does ice mean to them? Is it no longer a luxury the way that it used to be, the way that they made money and the identity that they created around the work?

That whole research process is ultimately what the work came out of. But it was a chance meeting of Neil’s instincts, my instincts, meeting the original owners, then their willingness to work with us and their willingness to understand what we were trying to do in briefly giving them that space back by putting their ice blocks into that space. I do think that there is something about that mystique that we trust in our project. Of course, it’s me and Neil and projects and process and all of that, but there is an equal component of mystique, that it’s meant to be and it’s honest. When that third component shows itself, there is no way to plan it. There is no way to incorporate that into the process except for being open and allowing for those magical things to happen.

What kind of work do you want to pursue in the future?
What we’re interested in exploring is this new phase or this new role that we have in our life with being new parents. Allowing time and the magic, or just the fact that there is this new role, asking ourselves, how do we find ourselves in it? How do we find answers that we’re looking for in it? How do we digest ourselves as parents? I think that it would be nice to have projects that we can incorporate that role in, because our works have always been a collaboration between Neil and I and our interior worlds finding an expression in the world externally.

Words Neeraja Srinivasan
Photography Suryan Saurabh
Date 14.8.2026