PARTICIPATING ARTISTS 2021 • Aakash Dubey • Abeer Khan • Abhishek Hazra • Aditi Kulkarni • Amitesh Grover • Amol Patil • Amshu Chukki • Anjana Kothamachu • Ankit Ravani • Ankur Yadav • Anuradha Rudrapriya • Archana Hande• Ashok Meena • Ayan Biswas • Ayisha Abraham • Babu Eshwar Prasad • Baiju Parthan • Bharati Kapadia • Biswajit Das • C Chaithanya • Chinmoyi Patel • Devadeep Gupta • Dharmendra Prasad • Gaura Singh • Gayatri Kodikal • Gigi Scaria • Hansa Thapliyal • Hetal Chudasama • Jahangir Jani • Jaideep Mehrotra • Jyotee • Kartik Mishra • Karthik K G • Katyayini Gargi • Khandakar Ohida • Khushbu Patel • Kunatharaju Mrudula • Kush Badhwar • Manjot Kaur • Manmeet Devgun • Maya Krishna Rao • Monali Meher • Moonis Ahmad • Murari Jha • Neha Choksi • Parashar Naik • Parul Gupta • Payal Arya • Pooja Iranna • Prabhakar Pachpute • Pranay Dutta • Praneet Soi • Prantik Basu • Pratul Dash • Ranbir Kaleka • Ranjini Krishnan • Rohan Chavan • Saba Hasan • Sabyasachi Bhattacharjee • Sajid Wajid Shaikh • Sandeep T K • Sanksriti Chattopadhyay • Sheba Chhachhi • Shreya Menon • Soghra Khurasani • Sohrab Hura • Sukanya Ghosh • Sumakshi Singh • Sunil Padwal • Surabhi Sharma • Surekha • Suresh B V • Swagata Bhattacharyya • Tallur L N • Tushar Waghela• Ushnish Mukhopadhyay • Veer Munshi • Vibha Galhotra • Vishal Kumaraswamy

VAICA 2 Artists’ Bios

AAKASH DUBEY initially took a postgraduate degree in sculpture from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara. Since then, he has gravitated towards photography and moving images and a research-based practice. He is drawn to issues of urban planning and the quality of life. He believes that infrastructural decisions inform more than just the physical city, and sees urban design as a form of regulation. Through his work, he tries to evaluate the subtle ways that the built environment contributes to the segregation of certain sections of city-dwellers.

ABEER KHAN is a self-taught photographer and film maker. Over the years she has acquired film making skills such as Production, Cinematography, Editing, Motion Graphics and Sound Mixing. Most of her films have emerged from her work as a one-woman crew. She says that space is very crucial to her projects. She finds it immensely interesting to observe how characters function in their own spaces and how they create worlds of their own in the process. Both her films in the VAICA festival are centred around the notions of home, security and well being.

ABHISHEK HAZRA has diverse interconnected interests that form a mesh. Social histories of science forms one strand. An ironic fascination with the lived lives of strangely persistent theoretical frameworks is another ongoing preoccupation. His recent lecture-performances explore speculative histories of various knowledge formations, through the figure of an amateur enthusiast. Hazra’s work has been exhibited widely at institutions across the world and India. He has been a Charles Wallace India Trust scholar and has received multiple awards including the 2011 Sanskriti Award for Visual Art.

ADITI KULKARNI studied fine art at Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalaya, Pune. She then gathered a series of multidisciplinary experiences and established her art practice. She likes to explore key concepts in physics such as the relationship between space and time and their  continuum. Interested in the role of bystanders and witnesses in given societal situations, she studies the impact of their responses. Aditi was a Charles Wallace India Trust scholar and has participated in residencies at workshops in Zambia, Egypt, the UK, Germany and France. Her videos have screened in festivals around the world. She sometimes collaborates with Payal Arya on projects.

PAYAL ARYA graduated from Bombay University and took up a BFA at Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Arts and Crafts, Mumbai, followed by an MFA from Shiv Nadar University, NOIDA. Her immersive installations explore the concept of non-linear time, notions of distance, position and bodily tolerance. She tries to encourage viewers to think about their own agency. Payal has exhibited in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Kochi and Kolkata, as well as the US and Germany. She has participated in art residencies at LAMO in Leh, at TIFA in Pune, and online art residency Vacant Zone.

AMITESH GROVER is an award-winning interdisciplinary theatre artist based in New Delhi. His practice is anchored in the art and politics of performance and he moves beyond theatre into installation, film, digital and text-based art. Amitesh’s work engages with themes like absence/presence, the necessity of remembering, of enacting resistance, and the embodiment of forms of knowledge that cannot be expressed in words. Amitesh is the recipient of several international grants and artist residencies, and his work is shown internationally in theatres, galleries, public spaces and on the internet. He also teaches theatre and curates programmes for performance artists.

AMOL PATIL is a conceptual and performance artist. Centred on a concern for Mumbai, he researches the construct of urbanisation and the invisibility of the working class in emergent urban imaginaries. After studying visual arts at the Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Arts and Crafts, Amol was drawn to the crossovers between performance art, kinetic installation and video installation. His recent art work is an ongoing investigation into the vibrant habitus of the chawls, workers’ housing typical of Bombay, built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He aims to build counter-memory through narratives on lost people and landscapes. Amol has shown at Yokohama, London, Stockholm, Paris, Pune, Dakar, Helsinki, and Amsterdam, among other places.

AMSHU CHUKKI imagines new worlds through his experimental videos. His practice is site-informed and explores the intertwining of reality and fiction. Amshu’s strategy is to decipher a landscape to invoke a site. The landscape becomes the protagonist and narratives unfold onto the site. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara and is a recipient of the Inlaks Fine Arts Award, 2014.He was listed in the ‘Forbes India 30 under 30’ in 2016. Currently based in Bengaluru, he has been part of many prestigious shows and residencies both nationally and internationally.

ANJANA KOTHAMACHU is a visual artist and practicing psychotherapist working in sculpture, video and drawing. Her practice is based on the tangible and intangible qualities of fantasies. The fantastic is a liminal space of being, and in trying to understand the role of imagination and its translation into our daily lives, she tries to highlight the interlacing of the lived and imagined. She sees fantasising as sometimes incidental and at other times, deliberately conceived with the minutest details plotted out. Anjana is on the faculty of the Wadiyar Centre for Architecture, Mysuru. She has participated in art residencies and exhibitions around the world and India.

ANKIT RAVANI briefly studied textile design, then did his undergraduate studies from the Faculty of Fine Arts in the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara followed by an MFA from Shiv Nadar University, NOIDA. His practice involves making fragmented narratives with found objects, drawings, photographs, videos and spaces that highlight states of vulnerability. Often starting with a personal memory, his works aim to understand alienation, fragility, numbness and conflict contained in daily experiences. Performative gestures as objects, photographs or video snippets are treated as documents that delineate the presence of an absent body. Born and brought up in Mumbai, Ankit and currently lives in Bengaluru.

ANKUR YADAV lives and works in Behror, near Alwar in Rajasthan. A graduate of Fine Arts from Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, he pursued his post-graduate studies in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara. He has worked on diverse concepts and in a range of mediums, where the primary focus is on the idea or the issue concerned, and the medium takes shape accordingly, framed by the perimeters of the space and time available. Ankur was the Inlaks Fine Art awardee for 2020, his works have been exhibited at art events in Ahmedabad, New Delhi, Pune, and Kolkata.

ANURADHA RUDRAPRIYA is a painter, printmaker, performer and video artist based in Vadodara. Educated at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, with a BFA in Painting and MFA in Printmaking, Anuradha works in multiple mediums. Through her explorations of the human body as a medium integral to her art, her work opens up to various social, economic and political facets of the human psyche. She engages with dominant cultural value systems and the experience of helplessness, pain and violence inflicted on women by patriarchy. Anuradha has been active in various residency programmes, in India and overseas and has a number of solo and group exhibitions to her credit.

ARCHANA HANDE, is an artist and curator, trained as a printmaker at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan and at Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara. She works in installation, drawing and video and has a wide repertoire of work to her credit. In 2000, she received the Charles Wallace India Trust Arts Award. Her work has been exhibited across India and the world at venues such as the Kunstmuseum Bern, Helsinki Art Museum, the Guangzhou Triennial, and the Yokohama Triennial. She curated the Kochi Student Biennale, 2021 and is currently working on her urban archives and is documenting her personal journeys.

ASHOK MEENA is an independent filmmaker and cinematographer, practicing what he calls the art of visual poetry. Born in a small village in Rajasthan, he was cut off from technology as the area had no electricity. As a reward for doing well in school, at age 12 he was gifted a camera by his father. This became a passion and he learned the basics of photography from the man who processed the film. After his graduation, he studied cinematography at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. Then he moved to Mumbai to make his way as a film maker.

AYAN BISWAS is an independent documentary maker and photographer living in Ladakh, the northern-most region of India and home to some of the highest mountains in the Indian subcontinent. Originally from Kolkata, he later worked as a technical art director with a Bengaluru-based theatre group. At present, he teaches art in village schools in Ladakh, with the aim of supporting local young people to develop sources of livelihood through art and crafts. He has been staying with a potter couple in the remote village of Likir for two years, recording the day-to-day lives of the villagers.

AYISHA ABRAHAM is an artist and experimental filmmaker based in Bengaluru. Since 2000, she has been crafting a series of short experimental films from home movies. These 8mm films existed as fragments and slices of a different reality, without a beginning or an end, and Ayisha meditated over them to give them a form. Her work has travelled to venues all over the world, including Kathmandu, New Delhi, New York, Linz, Cannes and Paris. Ayisha studied painting at Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara and at Rutgers University and the Whitney Independent Study Program in the US. Ayisha is currently Dean of School of Media Arts and Sciences at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bengaluru.

BABU ESHWAR PRASAD did his graduation in painting from Karnataka Chitrakala Parishat, Bangalore and has an MFA in printmaking from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara. Over the years he has sustained a deep interest in exploring media like sculpture, sound, photography, video and film. He also enjoys conducting workshops for art students. In 2014 Prasad made his feature film Gaalibeeja (Wind Seed) which was screened at the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image festival, in Mumbai and Bengaluru International Film Festival, 3rd San Francisco South Asian Film Festival and FilmColumbia festival. His second feature film Hariva Nadige Maiyella Kaalu (A running river is all legs) was completed recently.

BAIJU PARTHAN works with traditional mediums as well as art based on digital technology. His work critiques technology and its impact on human lives and experience of reality. He explores the ongoing collision between world views and ideologies and the resulting ontological fallout. Parthan’s education spanned a BFA in painting, followed by studies in Botany, Comparative Mythology and Philosophy. His vocabulary is built of arcane symbols, found imagery, contemporary photographic materials and other elements, woven together to create a dense multi layered phenomenological landscape. This is expressed through computer generated virtual objects, large scale prints on metallic surfaces and 3D lenticular prints.

BHARATI KAPADIA is an artist and performer whose mediums include painting, printmaking, collage, performance and video. She has engaged with the visual arts for over four decades, consistently showing original work. Dealing with issues related to inner evolution, memory and identity, her techniques include light as a crucial element. Based in Mumbai, she has shown widely in India and at international venues in New York, Boston, Nova Scotia, Vienna, Munich and Istanbul, and participated in residencies in India, Spain and the United States. She has curated art exhibitions and has been a consultant to collectors. Bharati is the founding curator of the VAICA project.

BISWAJIT DAS is a visual artist who has made documentary and experimental films for over a decade. Based in Guwahati, Assam, his works have been screened in national and international film festivals and in public screenings. His remarkable achievement is that when India went into lockdown in March 2020, Biswajit taught himself animation and uploaded one video every day for 100 days on social media. A compilation of these are part of VAICA 2. He is visiting faculty at the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communication, New Delhi and Ambedkar University of Delhi, and conducts workshops in filmmaking with several organisations.

CHAITHANYA is an ayurvedic physician from Palakkad, Kerala. With a master’s degree in Basic Philosophy of Ayurveda, she is currently working as a researcher. A Bharatnatyam dancer with over twenty five years of training and practice, she has performed widely across Kerala, Tamilnadu and Karnataka. She also practices ‘Navarasa sadhana’, a traditional form of acting. She discovered film making fairly recently, making a documentary in 2017 about a traditional practice with a deep medical aspect, carried out in a South Indian temple. The inspiration for THE FINAL FLUTTER came from her personal experiences of working with Covid-19 patients during the pandemic.

CHINMOYI PATEL works primarily with sculptural and video installations. After her BFA from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara she received an MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Chinmoyi’s recent exhibition venues include: Sakshi Gallery at Delhi; Space 118, Mumbai; Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai; Site Art Space, Vadodara; Conflictorium, Ahmedabad; Sluice Biennial, London; Barocode, Yangpyeong Museum, South Korea; Rencontres Internationales, Haus Der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin / Gaite Lyrique / Centre Pompidou, Paris. Residencies include: Space 118, Mumbai; Changdong Art Studio, Seoul; Green Papaya Art Projects, Manila. Chinmoyi has taught at the Department of Fine Arts, South Gujarat University, Surat.

DEVADEEP GUPTA’S artistic practices are based on an exploration of phenomena and perspectives related to the environment and human society. He brings an ironic humour into the portrayal of the absurdities of the everyday reality of his subjects. After undergraduate studies in architecture at Jammu University, he received a Master of Fine Arts in Public Arts and New Artistic Strategies, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany. Living in Guwahati, Assam, Devadeep’s focus is on long-term artistic research that seeks a balance between people and landscapes. He tries to contest widespread misunderstandings of the recent changes in climate. He shares his findings through the mediums of installations, photographs and videos.

DHARMENDRA PRASAD describes his practice as the harvesting of imagination, memories, times and change. His technique is based on recording representations of orality, toil, winds, horizons and deteriorating sites. Dharmendra’s outcomes are presented in the form of installations, videos, paintings, photography, texts, events, travelogues and beyond. He says his practice is born in the midst of stories of discrimination, hierarchies, chaos and silence, full of winds and dust, located between the fields of the Gangetic plains to the villages, water bodies and rainforests of northeast India. He co-founded the Guwahati-based Anga Art Collective.

GAURA SINGH is a visual artist and filmmaker who recently completed her Bachelor’s of Design in Moving Images from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. She is interested to develop an interdisciplinary filmmaking practice and wants to experiment with narratives and film language. Gaura believes that films devoid of a story structure can co-exist with scripted and planned fiction films and be viable. She hopes to make films based on Indian society, family structures and women’s issues through unique narrative styles.

GAYATRI KODIKAL is a visual artist and game designer, interested in the study of narratives. She works on the specificities of speculative, multilayered, entangled histories and the ephemeral. Her work leads her to world-building processes. Currently Speculative Fiction Coach at MAMA Rotterdam, Gayatri has previously worked as a freelance educator for University of Delft and Srishti School of Art and Technology. She graduated from the Dutch Art Institute with filmmaking and psychology and has a Masters in Film and Video Communication Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Gayatri is a fellow at BAK Utrecht, Fellowship for Situated Practice, a collective study on spectral infrastructure.

GIGI SCARIA completed a BFA at the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram and his MFA at Jamia Millia University, New Delhi. Subsequently, he developed a cross-media practice, working across painting, photography, installation, sculpture and video. His work explores issues of urban development, particularly migration, economic development and urban architecture. Since the year 2000, Scaria has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies in India and internationally. His work was represented in major expositions including the Venice, Singapore and Kochi-Muziris Biennales, and was included in important curated exhibitions and museum collections.

HANSA THAPLIYAL is a graduate in film direction from the Film and TV Institute, Pune. As a film maker and a teacher, she has worked on themes such as intimacies within the family and other subjects related to women’s lives. She has sought to re-contour the relationship between women and their handiwork, a form of art-making that was not taken seriously until recently. Her films Ghar Ek Studio (2017), The Outside In (2019) have been screened at numerous festivals. She has also directed Cinema ka Sapna Dekha Hai, a film that introspects on the city and the relationship of three women to cinema.

HETAL CHUDASAMA is a visual artist working in a range of media. Spanning live-action, installation, text and object making, Hetal sees writing as a critical tool and performance as a conjunction point. In order to offer alternative views on realities and fiction,her artistic processes explore theatrical mechanisms of representation, performativity of language, magic and rituals. Most of her works are explorations of the language of protest – be it an individual body or political and cultural rupture faced by vulnerable members of society. As a migrant from India in the UK, she inhabits many places, stories and many different truths that play into her works.

JAHANGIR JANI is a self-taught artist from Mumbai. He works with sculpture, installation, watercolors and film and is known for his life-size sculptures. Jahangir is concerned with questions around the making of culture. His work has been critically written about by authors and cultural theorists. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in India and abroad, and his works are part of important collections. Jahangir Jani has participated in national and international seminars, been invited to residencies and camps and had a stint as a visiting faculty at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

JAIDEEP MEHROTRA has been a presence on the art scene for over four decades, with over 24 solo shows across the world. He experiments and works with an amalgamation of techniques he has developed, such as applying metal on canvas or creating sculptures of carbon fibre. He has worked in diverse formats, like public sculptures, short films and infinite loop videos. Jaideep is inspired by contemporary culture and gets influences for his work from music, movies and works of fiction, as well as the world around him. Jaideep’s work has sold at several auctions over the years and is part of important collections.

JYOTEE has a large number of solo and group shows to her credit. She has participated in art residencies in Delhi and Wales, a sculpture symposium in Varanasi and she was part of a show in Dussledorf where she erected a work of 100 mild steel units with lights inside them, in 2001. She created a large site specific, interactive work at the Liverpool Biennial, 2002. She works with a range of materials, varying from pans and pinewood, steel and test tubes, bottles and resin. More recently, she has included text as an element in her work.

KARTHIK KG is an artist and researcher engaged with changing / moving / shifting phenomena as a reflection of technological abstractions. He seeks out their manifestation in our everyday lives and their iterations as (sci)fictional imaginaries. Karthik’s works take the shape of algorithmic data-visualisations, videos, paper-folds, drawings, games, posters and texts. Karthik did an M Res in the Curatorial / Knowledge Programme at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He holds an MA in Visual Arts from the Ambedkar University, New Delhi. Earlier, he was a Systems Analyst at Tata Consultancy Services at Chennai, for which he qualified with a BE from Anna University, Madurai.

KATYAYINI GARGI works with multiple media including painting, sculpture, animation, music and sound. She graduated with a BFA in Painting from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, followed by a Masters in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London. Since then, Katyayani has received a number of awards and grants including the 2020 Experimenter Generator Co-Operative Art Production Fund; 2017 Shortlist of the Frase Contemporary Art Prize; 2013 Mona Hatoum Scholarship and the 2013 Jeram Patel Award. She has taken part in a number of exhibitions / public performances / residencies in India and overseas. She lives and works in Delhi.

KHANDAKAR OHIDA, a visual artist living in West Bengal, completed her BFA from the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata and MFA from Faculty of Fine Arts, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She works with multiple media – painting, video art, installation art, kinetic art and film. Her major concern is giving a voice to women who cannot be heard, working on subjects such as the monotony of day-to-day life for married women confined to purdah, perceptions regarding relationships, virtue and religious devotion. Ohida’s work has been featured at numerous festivals including Serendipity Art Festival, Goa, 2019; VAICA 1, 2019-20; Ahang,Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi (2019).

KHUSHBU PATEL has an interdisciplinary art practice spanning diverse media. She works at various scales, presenting her work in the form of installations (site specific/site responding), photography, performative photography, videos, drawings and performance. She sees time as being a bonding element that integrates her work. The temporal quality of earthly existence and the inevitability of change and decomposition with time awaken her creativity. Currently based in Vadodara, Khushbu graduated from the Surat School of Fine Arts and did her post graduation in Art, Design and Performing Arts from Shiv Nadar University, NOIDA.

KUNATHARAJU MRUDULA obtained her Bachelor’s degree in painting from Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, and Master’s degree in painting from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, where she continues to live and work. Her art practice employs painting, video art, performance, drawing, sculpture and printmaking, to engage with a range of themes that relate to stereotypes and myths about women. She focuses on the body and subjectivity, cultural taboos, re-framing her lens to include marginalised women. She aims to develop discourse around cultural conditioning, discrimination, and the implications of restrictive standards applied to all women, in the context of a sexist culture.

KUSH BADHWAR practices across various media and social contexts. Being a believer in the potential of research and collectivity, Kush is interested in collaborative practices and other ecologies, including the life of sounds and images across stretches of time and periods of political change. To this end, he has worked closely with Wala, Word Sound Power, Frontyard Projects and Khanabadosh. At VAICA he will be showing a collaborative work that critically investigates the impact of consumption on natural resources and human bodies in Mumbai made with the Mohile Parikh Centre.

MANJOT KAUR navigates between drawing, painting, installation, time-based media and performance. She responds to her direct surroundings and examines how nature and humans adapt to changing environments. Using repetition, contradiction, metaphor and symbolism, she aims to create an epistemology of perception and understanding and to draw attention to current socio-political predicaments. Manjot did her BFA and MFA in painting from Govt. College of Art, Chandigarh and now lives in the Netherlands. Currently an artist-in-residence at Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Netherlands, Manjot was earlier an artist-in-residence at Unidee, Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistolleto, Italy, on a scholarship from Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation.

Manmeet Devgun is a Delhi-based performance and lens-based artist. A poet, school teacher and a single mother, she has exhibited her work in numerous group shows across Delhi, Vienna, Berlin, and Madrid, among other places. Manmeet loves to daydream, dance and live life on her own terms. Her work as a performance artist is closely linked to her own life and life-situations, often foregrounding key feminist concerns. She has performed at several festivals and at universities in India and overseas, the last being The Mother’s Studio, part of Five Million Incidents, 2019-2020.

MAYA KRISHNA RAO is a theatre artist who creates performances in musical and dance theatre, comedy and cross media. Her themes emerge from contemporary issues, notably questions around gender. Her productions are often the outcome of collaborations with filmmakers, sound designers and designers in other arts. She has taught theatre in the National School of Drama and Shiv Nadar University, and is active in Theatre-in-Education, training teachers in research-based theatre-making for children. Trained from childhood in Kathakali, Maya specialises in rigorous male roles. A graduate in Sociology from Miranda House, Delhi University, Maya did her Master’s in Political Studies, from Jawaharlal Nehru University, after which she did a Master’s in Theatre Arts, from Leeds University, UK and a Diploma in Drama-in-Education from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

MONALI MEHER works with her body and emotions as a form of public expression. Her visual language has evolved to include elements like decay, matter and memory; hybridisation and transformation; creation of new identities; belonging and intimacy. Monali graduated in Fine Arts from the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art, Mumbai. She has performed and exhibited internationally, receiving invitations, residencies and awards from all over the world. Monali keeps on devising performances as inspiration strikes her. Her public installation The Bridge Is Open, at Willem’s Bridge, Amsterdam opened in 2011 and is on view until 2025.

MOONIS AHMAD is from Srinagar, Kashmir. Working in installations, sculpture, programming, sound and video, his interest is in the intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation and historical enquiry. Exploring the potential of contested ecologies, he raises questions of territoriality and memory. Moonis has exhibited his work at venues in Australia, New Delhi, Switzerland and New Zealand amongst many others. He has participated in various residencies and received the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art’s Emerging Artist Award, 2017-18. Moonis teaches at the University of Melbourne and is a recipient of the Australian Graduate Research and Training Programme scholarship. He lives and works between Kashmir and Melbourne, Australia.

MURARI JHA is a New Delhi-based visual and performance artist. His multimedia practice explores personal narratives, the psychological processing of everyday socio-political occurrences, the transformation of the body by the environment and the temporal regimes it occupies, and the performativity of objects and spectatorship. What unifies these different fields of enquiry is an abiding interest in studying post-traumatic behaviours and absurdist situations. These transformational limits are expressed through the use of industrial materials such as iron, concrete, rubber, sealants and the medium of video. He holds an MFA from BR Ambedkar University, Agra (2012) and BFA from Patna University (2010).

NEHA CHOKSI embraces a confluence of disciplines, including performance, video, installation, and sculpture. Her work has been exhibited or performed at various museums and galleries. To name few: the Dhaka Art Summit (group, 2020; solo, 2018; group, 2016); 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016); Hayward Gallery, London (solo, 2015); Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California (2013); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2013); John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK (3-person, 2012); Asia Pacific Triennial, QAGOMA, Brisbane (2012); Shanghai Biennale (2012). She lives and works in Los Angeles and Mumbai.

PARASHAR NAIK is an independent film maker whose art practice mainly consists of the interpretation of his surroundings. He works as an artist and a curator with drawings, assemblages, kinetic sculpture and videos and has exhibited his works in several countries. He also works as a film editor, writer and director on commissioned projects. He completed his GD Arts from Vasai Vikasini School of Visual Arts. Working as a collaborator with Clark House Initiative he has contributed to the show Bunting, Guadeloupe Oriental, Home videos. He edited a series of videos for the Gondwana Series at the Centre Pompidou in 2017.

PARUL GUPTA’s work looks at architectural spaces as a generator of perceptual experiences. She likes to explore questions of perception, how a particular space informs the way we see. She is also interested in ways in which spatial interventions change our perceptions of individual spaces as well as our own perception of ourselves in that space. Parul’s work on paper takes on similar enquiries about the perception of the inhabited world, integrating geometrical forms, light and movement. After graduating from Nottingham Trent University in 2011, Parul has been showing in galleries and other spaces regularly. She was part of “Sarai Reader 09” at Devi Art Foundation, curated by Raqs Media Collective; had a solo project at Instituto Cervantes, Delhi; was part of a group show “When is Space?” at Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur curated by Prasad Shetty and Rupali Gupte. Currently based in NOIDA, she recently had her solo exhibition “Still, on the verge” at Gallery Nature Morte, New Delhi. She was featured in the Marg issue “In Focus: Abstraction” covering works by three generation of abstractionists, conceptualised by Geeta Kapur and Jyotindra Jain.

POOJA IRANNA is a New Delhi-based visual artist. Her art practice comments on the ever expanding urbanism throughout the globe. She worries that as a society we are fast losing our character and our history, depleting our creativity and resources as we seek ‘development’. Pooja uses a variety of mediums to express herself, from delicate drawings to staple pin sculptures, video, photography, and installations. Pooja did both her BFA and MFA in painting from College of Art, New Delhi. Her recent work includes: Silently– a proposed plan for rethinking the urban fabric, curated by Priya Pall for AICON Gallery, NY in New Delhi, 2020; Contemplating the urban, curated by Sandeep Biswas 2019. ‘The Urban Re-imagined’, curated by Ravi Agarwal, Serendipity Arts Festival,Goa, 2018.

PRABHAKAR PACHPUTE works in an array of mediums and materials including drawing, light, stop motion animation, sound and sculptural forms. Born in Chandrapur, Maharashtra, he lives and works in Pune. Pachpute often creates immersive and dramatic environments in his site-specific works, using portraiture and landscape with surrealist tropes to critically tackle issues of mining labour and the effects of mining on the natural and human landscape.  Pachpute received his BFA in sculpture from Indira Kala Sangit University, Khairagarh, Chhattisgarh and his MFA from Maharaja Sayajirao University Vadodara. He has exhibited extensively in solo shows and participated in numerous group exhibitions around the world and in India.

PRANAY DUTTA travels through ecological, economic and cultural landscapes in his imagination, investigating human-caused dystopias. Interested in the complex relationship between terrestrial species and landscapes, his visual language borrows from science fiction, architecture, gaming worlds and cinema to create surreal topographies and generate other worlds. There is an attempt to evoke a sense of unfamiliarity within the familiar, emphasising the uncanny, and an inclination towards creating possible futures. Pranay has a BVA and MVA in Painting from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara. He has been a part of various group shows in India and overseas, and was awarded the INLAKS Fine Art Award in 2019 and FICA x MMF Emerging Artist award.

PRANEET SOI was born and schooled in Kolkata. After studies in painting at Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, he received an MFA in visual arts at the University of California, San Diego. He was selected for a residency at the Rijkakdademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. He has lived in the Netherlands since and has been actively involved in projects in India and internationally. Praneet has moved across genres, experimenting with architecture, installation and time-based media. He has worked on a ‘notational methodology’, that allows for the generation of different registers of imagery and subject matter, creating juxtapositions that open the work to being viewed and interpreted.

PRANTIK BASU is an alumnus of the Film and Television of India, Pune. A film director and screenwriter, his work engages with the politics of gender and the fragile relationship between nature and humans. His short film Sakhisona won the Tiger Award for Best Short Film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2017 and received screenings and awards at several festivals worldwide. His Palace of Colours premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019. Prantik’s Bela, an hour-long documentary about everyday life in the eponymous village of Bela in West Bengal, was shown at Visions du Réel in Nyon in 2021 and at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2021.

PRATUL DASH was born in Burla, Sambalpur, Orissa. He works across multiple media including, video, performance, photographic, earth art, installation and sculpture. After his Bachelor’s degree from the B.K. College of Arts and Crafts, Bhubaneswar, and his Master’s in painting from the College of Art, New Delhi, Pratul has held numerous solos and group shows by noted curators. A recipient of the Inlaks Foundation Award, he has also participated in a number of residency programmes. Pratul is widely acknowledged for raising awareness about environmental issues. He is concerned about the living conditions of migrant laborers in Indian cities and the encroachment of the expanding cities on the surrounding green eco-systems. 

RANBIR KALEKA grew up in Patiala, Punjab. After his studies at the College of Art in Chandigarh, he received a Master’s Degree in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London. Ranbir Kaleka’s work reflects a view of the world that appears to place reliance on the juxtaposition of improbabilities. His movement into video art is part of his explorations of the ‘psychological event’, which takes place outside the physical painting, through the use of light to create the image. Kaleka has also created and exhibited constructed photographs, sculptures and installations. His work has been honored with awards, exhibited around the world and collected by museums and private collectors in India and abroad.

RANJINI KRISHNAN holds a PhD in cultural studies from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bengaluru. Her writing, research and other interventions explore the connections between concepts and expressions in creative arts. Producer and script-writer of the award-winning documentary A Pestering Journey (2010), she is also the co-script writer of feature film, Kanyaka Talkies (2013) which received the Best Screenplay prize at the New York Indian Film Festival. Ranjini co-curated a four-day thinking summit entitled Kala Shareeram Chintha (Art, Body, Thinking) as part of Kochi Biennale 2016.

ROHAN CHAVAN is a Mumbai based scenographer in the events industry. He says “I have no formal training in any school of thought. Being a dropout from engineering, I knew that I was interested in building things.” Rohan says he feels good about this lacuna because “I have been inquisitive and am learning from music, films, photography and art, and I am not bound to any institutional framework.” He says he has been influenced by films since childhood. Lockdown provided the opportunity to create some video sketches to respond to the prevailing political atmosphere. Rohan says he is interested in experimental films and being new to it, he is focussing on learning.

SABA HASAN is a noted contemporary artist with a multimedia art practice. Best known for the conceptual and lyrical strength of her works, perhaps stemming from her formal training in anthropology, Saba’s practice is further informed by cultural and social perspectives. Her conversation-based video La Verite / Haqeeqat / Truth was a finalist for the Celeste Contemporary Art Prize, Milan, 2014. Saba’s works have been exhibited at major venues like the 55th International Venice Biennale; the National Gallery of Art, Colombo; the Hohenburg Castle, Salzburg; the Chelsea Film Festival, New York; the Bali International Film Festival and the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala, Trivandrum.

SABYASACHI BHATTACHARJEE calls himself an image maker and a storyteller. Born in Tripura, he acquired his BVA from the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Agartala. He then moved to Vadodara for his Masters in Visual Art from Maharaja Sayajirao University. He finds himself documenting the chaos in his surroundings, looking for patterns to make sense of them. He uses digital animation to create spatial narratives that play with time and space. He also likes to draw on scientific theories to formulate socio-political or philosophical arguments, such as the idea of cacophony in a social context. Sabyasachi lives in Vadodara, often collaborating on projects with an independent film crew and a theatre company.

SAJID WAJID SHAIKH is a visual artist whose practice is centred on the conjunction of the conscious and the subconscious mind. His drawings transcend space, time, and memory to question various givens. He creates a world of anomalies, seemingly fictitive and surreal. The artist also explores conceptual art by recontextualising everyday objects, to challenge their form and function. Sajid works through drawing, photography, videos, sculptural installations, and performance-based pieces.

KARTIK MISHRA is an Indian avant-garde/experimental film maker, painter, sculptor and musician, whose works often revolve around the theme of religion and human condition. An ad film director by profession, some of his latest works include:
an experimental short called ‘Scenes From The Memoirs Of A Socialist Hermaphrodite’ is currently running in the international festival circuit and recently got premiered at the Veudemic Film Festival. Under his musical moniker ‘Colorblind’, he has released 3 EPs and 2 LPs, including the critically acclaimed noise/experimental rock record ‘Post Modern Holocaust’.

SANDEEP TK is a lens-based artist from Thalassery, Kerala, practicing and living in Bengaluru. His practice involves documentary photography, moving images and text. He works with the idea of space, belonging and complex human relationships through personal experience, memory and exploration of his identity and surroundings. He received the Inlaks Fine Art Award in 2020.

SANKRITI CHATTOPADHYAY is an alumna of the Film and Television of India, Pune, trained in Direction and Screenplay Writing. Interested in building an art practice with a conceptual rigour, her first degree was an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. A participant of research programmes at Film University Babelsberg, Germany and WITS University Film and Television, Johannesburg, South Africa, she has received grants from the India Foundation for the Arts and Kolkata Creativity Centre. Her documentary ‘Reality without a Name’ has been shown in the 12th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala and other festival venues.

SHEBA CHHACHHI is an installation artist and photographer who investigates questions of gender, eco-philosophy, violence and visual cultures. An activist who documented the women’s movement in the 1980s, Chhachhi moved on to create intimate, sensorial encounters through large multimedia installations. Her work seeks to bring the contemplative into the political. She has exhibited widely at important art events internationally and her works are held in significant public and private collections, including Tate Modern, UK; Kiran Nadar Museum, Delhi; BosePacia, New York; Singapore Art Museum; Devi Art Foundation, Delhi; National Gallery of Modern Art, India. Chhachhi speaks, writes and teaches in both institutional and non-formal contexts.

SHREYA MENON describes herself as an animation filmmaker and visual artist. After completing her BA from Jai Hind College in Mumbai, she pursued studies in Animation and Motion Graphics from Unitedworld Institute of Design, Karnavati University, Ahmedabad. She feels compelled to tell stories and to strike up conversations with people from different backgrounds and to collaborate with them. She thinks she is drawn to people that seem interesting from afar, but up close, their stories sometimes turn out to be frightening.She hopes to make documentary films, incorporating animation as a form of expression that can bridge facts and emotions meaningfully.

SOGHRA KHURASANI is a visual artist with a postgraduate degree in printmaking from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara. Her undergraduate studies were in painting, from Andhra University, Vishakhapatnam. Her recent solo shows include: SKIN, Gitler & __, New York 2018; Cratered Fiction curated by Sumesh Sharma,TARQ, Mumbai, 2015; To Speak for the Mute, Gitler & __ New York, 2015; Reclaiming Voices, curated by Noman Ammouri at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad 2014; One day it will come out curated by Sumesh Sharma and Hena Kapadia at TARQ Gallery, 2014, Mumbai. Soghra received the National Academy Award of the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi in 2016.

SOHRAB HURA has a professional core in photography, and he often extends his practice into film, text and sound. In 2010 he made Pati, a short film about an village in Madhya Pradesh. He assembled photographs, sounds, video footage as well as text and voiceover to give a sense of daily life in this village. Continuing his experiments with this half-moving form that draws from still images, he made The Lost Head & the Bird (2017), Bittersweet (2019), both of which are showing in VAICA and The Coast (2020). Sohrab Hura has also published five volumes under his imprint, UGLY DOG.

SUKANYA GHOSH works across painting, photography, animation and the moving image. After a degree in painting at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, Sukanya studied animation at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. She has shown her work at venues including the Lianzhou Museum of Photography, Qingyuan, China;Jimei x Arles Festival, Xiamen, China; Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa and the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai. She received the Charles Wallace India Trust Award; the Sarai Independent Fellowship and several other awards. Sukanya has managed the arts programmes at the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre, Kolkata and has extensive graphic design experience. She lives and works between Delhi and Kolkata.

SUMAKSHI SINGH is an artist and an educator who has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC); Oxford University, UK; MASSart Boston; College of Art, Delhi; Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, UK. She curated “Deeper within its Silence – Form and Unbecoming” for the Devi Art Foundation, Delhi, currently ongoing. Her installations, animations, paintings, threadwork and sculptures have been exhibited at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi; Saatchi Gallery London; Kochi Biennale; Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago among other museums and galleries.

SUNIL PADWAL uses urban landscapes and everyday objects to twist conventional notions of reality and engage the imagination of the viewer. Interested in observation and memory, Sunil explores the rich intersections between two-dimensional drawing and three-dimensional found objects, personal belongings and documents. His formal education was in Fine Arts followed by a degree in Applied Art, both at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art, Mumbai. Solo exhibitions include: 2019: Lining an archive, GALLERYSKE, New Delhi; 2014: Confluxes, The Arts House, Singapore; 2012: Soliloquies, notes from the drawing book, presented by Veranda at Space 1857, Chicago; 2008: Myopia, Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai.  Sunil was born in Mumbai and continues to live there.

SURABHI SHARMA is a filmmaker based in Abu Dhabi and Mumbai. An alumna of the Film and Television of India, Pune, trained in Direction and Screenplay Writing, she has worked on several feature length documentaries apart from some short fiction films and video installations. Cinema verite and ethnography are the genres that inform her filmmaking. Her key concern has been documenting cities in transition through the lens of labour, music and migration, and most recently reproductive labour. Cinema verite and ethnography are the genres that inform her filmmaking. She is currently teaching in the Film and New Media Programme at New York University, Abu Dhabi.

SUREKHA has explored artistic forms through installations, video works and photography, as an artist and curator. Her works investigate how visuality can engage with gender / ecology / aesthetics, and the socio-political aspects of public and private spaces. Her work has been shown in venues around the world including Ocean Flower Island Museum, Hainan, China; Museum Guimet, Paris; Ecole Beaux Arts, Paris; Royal Academy of Art, London; New Media Festival, Dhaka; Alhamra Art Council, Lahore and Karachi and Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai. Surekha has participated in international art residencies and has been involved in visual art collectives like BAR1 and was a founder curator of Rangoli Metro Art Center, Bengaluru.

SURESH B V is caught up in questions of realism and representation, producing a body of work that continuously negotiates the visual fields of the contemporary world. His work draws on multiple realisms, raising questions of history and narration. He employs combinations of videos, paintings, installations, digital prints and mass media images. Suresh was initially trained at the Ken School of Arts, Bengaluru and later studied at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara and the Royal College of Art, London. He currently heads the Fine Arts Department at the Sarojini Naidu School, University of Hyderabad. Suresh enjoys engaging in collaborative projects with authors of children’s books and theatre persons.

SWAGATA BHATTACHARYYA visual artist, lives and works in Kolkata. After earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, he moved to a Master of Visual Arts in Painting from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara. Through his practice, his works give visibility to the speculative narratives of existing power structures and the multifaceted ways these shape our world. His enquiry lies in how modes of power shape policies and his visualisations speculate on the construction of future environments, through architecture, urban design and artificially manufactured landscapes. He works with drawing, photographs and CGI to create simulated worlds.

TALLUR L N works with sculpture, wall pieces, interactive work and site-specific installations, to expose the absurdities of everyday life and the characteristic anxieties of contemporary society. Living between Bengaluru and Seoul, Tallur correlates the traditional and contemporary, incorporating craft objects, found material – organic and industrial in his work. His sculptures and installations have been widely exhibited internationally. He was awarded the Skoda Prize in 2012 and his work was featured at the first edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012. Tallur received a BFA in Painting from Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts, an MFA in Museology from Maharaja Sayyajirao University, and an MA in in Contemporary Fine Art Practice from Leeds Metropolitan University, UK.

TUSHAR WAGHELA is a filmmaker and visual artist with a Master’s degree in Indian Philosophy. He has been working in the field of contemporary art and experimental cinema for 25 years. His video arts, installations, short films and experimental cinemas have been shown in museums, galleries, universities and in over 150 international film festivals. These include the Cannes Film Festival, London Asian Film Festival, British Film Institute, the Collectif Jeune Cinema Paris, Mumbai Film Festival, and many more.Tushar lives and works from his studio in Chhattisgarh. He is currently working on a Pop Art series called ‘Without Ticket’ using street art, spray painting and mixed media techniques.

USHNISH MUKHOPADHYAY lives and works in Kolkata and Vadodara. After his BFA in painting from Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata, and MFA in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayyajirao University, Vadodara, Ushnish’s work has shown in a number of group exhibitions. These include Svikriti at Birla Academy, Kolkata; Ars Moriendi online exhibition; Borderless Lockdown, online exhibition; Artpro International Video Art Festival at National Art Gallery, Dhaka all in 2020. Ushnish’s awards include the 2020 Sarala-Basant Kumar Birla Award from Birla Academy, Kolkata; Nasreen Mohamedi Scholarship in 2019-2018; Ministry of Culture, Government of India, Scholarship to Young Artists, 2016-2017.

VEER MUNSHI was born in Srinagar, Kashmir, growing to adulthood there. After graduating from Kashmir University, he studied for a Master’s in Fine Art at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara. Veer considers himself to be a displaced person, banished from his cherished homeland, Kashmir. His work seeks to highlight the constant turmoil within that comes from being dislocated from home and his images encourage viewers to reflect on forced migrations. Veer has shown solo in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Kochi, Perth, Edinburgh and Geneva with installations, videos, paintings and photographs. He has participated in important group shows and has been honoured with several public awards and fellowships from the Government of India.

VIBHA GALHOTRA lives and works in Delhi. She has been concerned with the consequences of human activity on the environment. Known for her large-scale sculptural installations, Vibha’s practice ranges across photography, film, video, found objects, performative objects, sculpture, installation, text, sound, drawing and public interventions. Vibha has shown extensively in India and internationally, with several projects involving local communities and their sites, leading to a range of site-specific works. Vibha’s formal studies were in graphics at the Government College of Art, Chandigarh, and at Kala Bhavan, Visva-Bharati University. She is the recipient of a number of fellowships and awards including the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship and the Rockefeller Grant.

VISHAL KUMARASWAMY practices as an artist and filmmaker. He received a Master’s degree in photography from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, London. Based in Bengaluru, Vishal has shown his works at major exhibitions including the Venice Biennale’s Research Pavilion; Athens Digital Arts Festival; Apex Art’s Saavdhaan – Regimes of Truth at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, USA. In 2020, Vishal was awarded the main commission by the Royal College of Art and Furtherfield in London for his Empathy Loading (www.empathyloading.com). He has been an artist in residence with several institutions and is currently a virtual resident at SAVAC’s ADA-DADA Residency Program in Toronto.