Moonis Ijlal is an artist, historian and journalist. His work archives lived-experience of oppression amplified by modern technology, and the monopoly-driven ‘naturalisation’ of technology that may transform humans to a dot in the larger loop of the machines’ working. He archives manufactured conflicts as well as transformations machines impose on humans to ‘fix’ them as per their own new (flawed) logics. He is interested in offline and online phenomenology (lived experience) amongst the users of technology, the life of the real and digital consumption, normalisation of structural exclusion as well as processes that dismantle apartheids within the realms of the real and the digital, in the present.
His current works engage with issues of adaptation under situations of forced displacement, surveillance, censorship and strife.
In 2025 he opened his solo show Lie Machine: Men and the moon do not care (Shrine Empire-India Art Fair parallel 2025, New Delhi and Rajiv Menon Contemporary Gallery, Los Angeles); India Art Fair, 2024; Art Mumbai 2025 & 2024; Hostile Witness at Art SG, 2023; Hostile Witness, Baaraan Ijlal and Moonis Ijlal, Shrine Empire, New Delhi 2021.