Cairo Dipika: Casting a Lens on Collaboration

Jessica Canje and Isha Dipika Walia come together to build visual work that contributes to a world that, according to them, “may allow us to evolve past how we’ve been written”. Based in New York City, the Sri Lankan-Canadian and Indian creatives and friends are known as photography duo Cairo Dipika. Individually, they come with experience that spans across art direction and media cultures, but together, they have a multidisciplinary visual practice that tells a deeply nuanced story.

“We are interested in the intimately nuanced spaces and stories of the people that feel, not look, like us,” they explain, approaching their work with a broader goal of breaking the east and west binary of perspective. They care to reshape what it means to be an artist in collaboration, in union, allowing binaries of both discipline and identity to be broken down at the same time. 

Canje and Walia talk about their friendship not just as important, but what underpins their work. As for what fuels their creative process? “Hanging out together,” they concur. “Our best work is made with each other.” Friendship seeds the work and art they build. For Walia, the defining moment of her career to date has been the “immense privilege” of saying no in order to spend time with friends. As their work oscillates with their lives in a way that makes it more meaningful, it is a privilege to carve out time to spend with friends, she says, but it’s also those friends that make the work more meaningful. 

From the portraits they capture to the people they collaborate with, Cairo Dipika’s work reflects this innate care and friendship. The duo describes this as enabling them to become better artists. “Our creative chemistry was instantaneous,” they recall. “We were constantly sharing the things that inspired us and, within a few months of living together as roommates, we’d already begun to formulate ideas together.” Canje describes her inspiration for her work as an innately personal journey of embracing transformation and fragility. “I’m finally getting over myself and leaning into what I’ve always loved,” she adds.

As true artists striving to build a community through their work, Canje and Walia are influenced by people who create with sincerity and for others—feminist writer-philosopher Audre Lorde and multidisciplinary composer and spiritual leader Alice Coltrane included. Resisting the capitalistic notions of output, they envision a world in which art and artists are not demarcated through individualism and tokenisation, mirroring that very sentiment in their relentless pursuit of authentic storytelling. “It often feels like we are a band honing in on our sound; Cairo Dipika is the rhythm, and photography is our instrument.”