Aray yaar

Founded in 2020, the Aray YAAR Collective—Ruby Singh, Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal, and Hari Alluri—is a group of diasporic artists working at the intersections of poetry, music, performance, justice, and storytelling. We believe in art as a site of ceremony, resistance, and world-building—one that invites us to grieve, remember, reimagine, and repair. 

We are  committed to crafting liberatory futures through sound, story, and embodied expression. Rooted in poetry, music, , and memory, our practices span disciplines and continents, weaving the personal and the political, the ancestral and the emergent. Together, we explore art as ceremony, as resistance, and as a tool for reimagining how we live with ourselves, each other, and the planet. Our work honours multiplicity—of voice, of form, of lineage—centring BIPOC experiences, radical imagination, and community-based creation. 

 

Through performance, facilitation, collaboration and mentorship, we seek to spark connection and transformation by creating spaces of collective witnessing, grief, joy, and possibility.

Aray YAAR's work has been featured at the Indian Summer Festival, Spring Equinox Summit, in the anthology We Were Not Alone and have delivered workshop through Our Stories, Our Voices. 

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In Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi, Aray YAAR is a phrase pulsing with intimacy. It means “Oh friend,” but it holds more than translation can carry. It’s the sigh between laughter and grief. The shoulder bump between stories. The nudge that says, I see you. I know you. Let’s go. We chose Aray YAAR as the name for our collective to honour the spirit of chosen kinship, diasporic connection, and creative camaraderie. It’s how we call each other into the work and into the world—with affection, irreverence, and the deep understanding that art, like friendship, is where we begin again and again.