Suchi Reddy: Art and Empathy
With the world feeling wildly divided these days, the talented architect and artist Suchi Reddy has responded by creating meaningful work that brings clarity to this moment. Two of her recent thought-provoking installations take on heavy topics that are hauntingly apropos of the times.
The immersive sculptural and sonic installation Turbulence 2025 at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden illuminates the beauty of the fractured pieces of society and calls on viewers to lead with empathy to incite healing. And her installation Bias and Belonging at Colgate University is literally a woven tapestry of the college community’s individual experiences with identity, fitting in, and living with inequity and prejudice in our society.
Turbulence photography credit Gabrielle Beaumont
Turbulence 2025
On view at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden through fall 2025, Turbulence 2025 is a sculptural and sonic installation inspired by plant bioacoustics—how plants send and sense signals through vibrations and sound. (Yes, even plants are not so silently screaming these days!) With composer Malloy James, Reddy created an ethereal soundscape to mimic these hidden signals. Visitors can walk through reflective corridors, watch shifting planes of metal, or sit on benches to soak it in. It’s beautiful, immersive, and just unsettling enough.
“We are living in a time of profound planetary turbulence, where people, places, and ecosystems are breaking,” she explains. “Yet I am inspired by the beauty within the broken—by how awareness and empathy can lead to healing. This piece is an invitation to see differently, to feel more deeply, and to act more consciously.”
Bias and Belonging photography credit: Adam Antalek
Bias and Belonging
In her exhibition Bias and Belonging at Colgate University’s Clifford Gallery, Reddy digs into how we experience inclusion and exclusion—both in real life and in digital spaces shaped by AI and new tech. As artist-in-residence, Reddy held intimate conversations with students, faculty, staff, and local community members, weaving their stories into a massive textile surrounded by icons, texts, and abstracted forms.
“The literal and metaphorical fabric of Bias and Belonging is the sentiments and experiences of the community,” she explains. “It brought my lifelong inquiry into bias and belonging to light in a very poignant way.”
Though Reddy’s titles echo the darkness of the times, they don’t add to the collective doom. Her works leave us with a positive call to action to find beauty in what’s broken and push us toward empathy, innovation, and connection. An invitation to examine more deeply and come together? I’ll take it!
—Louis Noha