Neelima Jeychandran is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Asian Studies and the African Studies Program at The Pennsylvania State University. She works on visual cultures, material heritage, rituals, architectures of memory, and spatial (re)fabulation of legacies of slavery and more general trade in West and East Africa and South Asia. She is the co-convenor of the research group Indian Oceanologies, a multi-campus working group that explores contemporary lives, spaces, and relational practices in the Indian Ocean. She is co-editor of the book Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (2020) and co-editor of the Verge: Studies in Global Asias journal issue on “Indian Ocean Studies, African-Asian Affinities” (2022), and series co-editor for the Routledge Indian Ocean and Trans-Asia book series, and managing co-editor of Kaleidoscope: Ethnography, Art, Architecture, and Archeology, Routledge India (Focus Short Book Series).
She is finishing her book Textured Pasts: Material Heritage and Traces of African-Asian Relations in the Oceanic South in which she brings together the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean worlds into relational consideration by looking at material and immaterial circuits of exchanges.
Critical Juncture: Indo-Polish Exhibition, Kochi Biennle 2015
Artists: Sanchayan Ghosh, Tushar Joag, Magda Fabianczyk, Gopakumar R, Joanna Rajkowska, Alicja Rogalska, Sharmila Samant, Dinesh Shenoy, Cop Shiva, Łukasz Surowiec, Julita Wójcik, Artur Żmijewski. Curators: Magda Fabiańczyk and Neelima Jeychandran, see below.
Concept Note: Critical Juncture brings together a collection of artistic responses to contemporary political and social issues in the state of Kerala, India and Poland – two geographically remote territories that both have been influenced by different notions and practices of communism. As a starting point for the project, the curators adopted the term ‘critical juncture’, which is used in political and social sciences to describe a point of liquidity or a short phase during which it is possible to change the course of events. The participating artists investigate socio-political changes that have been happening in Poland and India, exploring, amongst others, issues of in/visibility, the importance of utopian thinking, forms of social self-organisation and mechanisms of exclusion.
In 2012, visual artist Shilo Shiv Suleman started Fearless in response to the powerful protests that shook the country in response to the “Nirbhaya” tragedy in Delhi, India. We have been at the frontline of crucial moments of resistance in South Asia, including Shaheen Bagh in 2020 and most recently at the Gotagogama protest site in Sri Lanka in June 2022. We have created over 40 public monuments in 16 countries, working with communities most invisible or marginalized – including Muslim and Dalit women in India, Indegenous communities in Brazil and North America, communities affected by gang violence in Pakistan, Syrian and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and queer communities in Tunisia and Indonesia as they reclaim these public spaces with the images and affirmations they choose.
Chinar Shah Home Sweet Home has been an exhibition series that uses lived-in, domestic spaces to exhibit art works, collaborate with artists and curators across India and outside. Since its inception in 2015, we have organized twelve exhibitions, collaborated with more than fifty artists and curators from India and abroad, building a large and engaged audience. Home Sweet Home is based in Bangalore and has operated from temporary, rented spaces in Delhi, Fort Kochi, and Ahmedabad. It has been a space for artists and curators to come together and experiment with the idea and fundamental premise of the exhibition outside the bounds of white walls.
Ishita Shah is trained as a designer and historian. Her practice revolves around the idea of curating for culture. Through the pandemic of 2020, she has been conducting online engagements on constructing personal archives in order to discuss creative possibilities for archiving in India and the Global South. She has also been the founding archivist and oral historian at CEPT Archives, and has been cocurating a public engagement platform, Design-ed Dialogues, where the urban community comes together to decode complex cultural issues. Ishita is also a Graham Foundation Grant recipient 2020.
Sandhya Annaiah Singularity
An exhibition of Photographs by Sandeep T K
Curated by Sandhya Annaiah
The series of photographs – ‘Singularity’ by Sandeep TK captures a time and a frame of his mind when he created this body of works. Photographer Sandeep received a scholarship to go on a residency in Germany, while passing through the phase of separation and bitter heartbreak in his personal life. Coming from a populous country like India, he was offered residency in a place which was scantily populated. The elaborate architecture and wide streets made the place seem all the more deserted. This pushed him to begin reflecting upon the self and understanding the meaning of solitude. Without conversation with most of his subjects, he could only imagine the story behind each of them. Sandeep was the silent observer. Through his photographs, Sandeep brings together a variety of people with whom he thought he shared a similar status quo.
Shubigi Rao makes layered installations of books, etchings, drawings, pseudo-scientific machines, metaphysical puzzles, video, ideological board games, garbage and archives, and has been exhibited and collected in Singapore and internationally. Her interests include archaeology, neuroscience, libraries, archival systems, histories and lies, literature and violence, ecologies and natural history. Her immersive and tongue-in-cheek books, artworks and installations range from creating archaeological archives of garbage, writing How To manuals for building a nation and a culture from scratch, discovering and diagnosing peculiar forms of urban malaise where digital dandruff and pixel dust accumulate like lint and cloud the contemporary brain, building immortal jellyfish, to pseudo-museums regenerating mechanisms of knowledge accumulation, storage, and destruction.
Gayatri Nair is a trained engineer, a photographer, an arts manager, and an educator. She had over 7 years of international experience with a leading bank in network infrastructure and business management before she built a 10-year career in the arts. She is currently the founding Trustee of the Chennai Photo Biennale Foundation as well as heads CPB Prism – the children’s education wing of the Foundation. She was awarded the ARThink South Asia Fellowship in 2019 which enabled her to work in Germany at the Biennale für Aktuelle fotografie.
Her passion for working with children and education led her to build and grow CPB Prism where she works directly with administrators, teachers, and students to bring visual art learning into curriculums. CPB Prism has spent over 800 hours teaching photography to over 1000+ students since its launch two years ago. Students are taught the basics of digital photography and editing using phones which are more accessible than ever before. The resulting works made by a very diverse student body have been exhibited in the Government Museum, on the Chennai beach, a mall, and other urban spaces. The education program continues to grow and evolve with the Chennai Photo Biennale.
UNRESTROOM is a digital archive of restroom signs.
Toilets or the lack of them are often are sites of discrimination. Restroom signs indicate who gets access to safe sanitation, and how bodies and gender are perceived and constructed. Signs, and with them, restrooms often perpetuate ableist and transphobic ideas that bodies and birth assignment define who we are and where we belong.
Our crowd-sourced collection dates back to 1961 and continues to map change in representation and accessibility over time. We need your support in building diversity within unRestroom’s archive of signs, starting conversations about their impact, and catalysing action for a more inclusive world. https://lekha.cc/institution/unrestroom
Critical Collective is an initiative by art curator and critic Gayatri Sinha. Critical Collective works towards building knowledge in the arts in India. Gayatri Sinha is an art critic and curator based in New Delhi. Her primary areas of inquiry are around the structures of gender and iconography, media, economics and social history. As a curator, her work has cited the domains of photography and lens-based work from archival and contemporary sources.
Regarding India is series of video interviews with contemporary artists living and working in India. Initiated through a Fulbright Fellowship in 2011, the videos were created to contribute to Myers’s University of Connecticut course on Indian art. Reflective of a dynamic and diverse contemporary art scene during a decade of unprecedented and often volatile change, the interviews engage with aspects of Indian history, society, culture and current events through the creative work, experiences, and insights of artists. The series is ongoing and will eventually include over sixty interviews. Regarding India has been produced, directed and edited by Kathryn Myers.
Madhushree Kamak is a maverick scientist, illustrator and information experience designer who is the Programme Manager at Science Gallery Bengaluru. Living Exhibitions: Science Gallery Bengaluru’s Shape of Practice
Jahnavi Phalkey & Madhushree Kamak Curator Jahnavi Phalkey and designer Madhushree Kamak of the nonprofit Science Gallery Bengaluru present their “living exhibitions.” These creations expand the boundaries of research through atypical collaborations that draw in the general public for conversations on contemporary issues.
Vidya Gopal illustrator and an ‘Intense Window Seat Person’ with a permanent side eye seeking out little anomalies in the mundane, everyday. Her published work includes Editorial, Children’s book and comic illustrations. She hopes to publish some of her Personal art projects as soon the virus backs down a bit. She has also learnt from the internet that powdered saunf (fennel seeds) and lime zest are an amazing cookie combination and wants the world to know. Yada yada, the first three of us who have come together just woke up one morning wanting to run a survey. Of course we were nudged by other such movements that have very little or no focus on India-based artists and we understand how nuanced and complex the India context is.
Founded in 2013 Sandbox Collective continues to serve as a free flowing hub for artists, curators, students, arts administrators, designers, interns and artists-in-residence. Our special focus is gender, gender equality and sexuality. We curate , produce and tour performances and festivals as well as facilitate collaborations between artists, audiences and cultural spaces, both nationally and internationally, with the aim of creating meaningful dialogue and culturally vibrant communities. We work with Individuals and organisations from across the world on artistic as well as research oriented projects that are grounded in India. We also offer research assistance and mentorship facilities to artists from across the world looking for research or artistic collaborations in India.
Dialectograms depict places that are marginal, under threat or disappeared. They borrow elements from ethnography, psychogeography and graphic art to depict the relationship we have with place, and each other. Over an extensive period of fieldwork the people of that place are encouraged to work with me and share in the process of depicting their environment. Reproductions of the Dialectograms have been engraved onto wood, reproduced as weatherproof signs, made into vinyl decals, display tables, digitised for websites and printed as fold out posters.
I coined the term dialectogram to describe the perspective of the drawings; made from the ground up, with the people who make the place what it is, in their own words and way of speaking. Their vernacular visual language is to diagrams what demotic speech is to Received Pronunciation – hence ‘dialect-ogram’.
Kathmandu Nepal Artists and Cultural practitioners
Bidhata K C’s installation, Out of Emptiness (2023) is an interactive sculpture is composed of large tin cans set on a wheel that encircles a central spindle. K C’s work refers to the late 19th-century Tibetan prayer wheel that sits nearby, a Buddhist ritual item that is common in Tibet, as well as the artist’s native country of Nepal. On travels through Nepal, K C came across a number of handmade prayer wheels also made from emptied tin cans, which are often left behind by tourists trekking Mt. Everest and other treacherous, regional mountaintop peaks.
Jupiter Pradhan delves into the complex interplay of social, political, and cultural dynamics in contemporary Nepalese society. He believes that art, throughout history, serves as a reflective lens on reality and beyond, revealing the subtle intricacies concealed from ordinary perception. Pradhan reimagines Western stories such as Gulliver’s Travels and relates it to neocultural colonialism in Nepal. Reimagining a scene from Gulliver’s Travels, a cherished story from Jupiter Pradhan’s childhood, The Protectors comments on the complexities of cultural evolution and the burgeoning impact of neocultural colonialism. The installation features traditional Nepalese masks, military toys from 1990s Nepal, and a body cast of the artist.
Dialectograms depict places that are marginal, under threat or disappeared. They borrow elements from ethnography, psychogeography and graphic art to depict the relationship we have with place, and each other. Over an extensive period of fieldwork the people of that place are encouraged to work with me and share in the process of depicting their environment. Reproductions of the Dialectograms have been engraved onto wood, reproduced as weatherproof signs, made into vinyl decals, display tables, digitised for websites and printed as fold out posters.
I coined the term dialectogram to describe the perspective of the drawings; made from the ground up, with the people who make the place what it is, in their own words and way of speaking. Their vernacular visual language is to diagrams what demotic speech is to Received Pronunciation – hence ‘dialect-ogram’.
The art assignment has been gathering assignments from a wide range of artists, each commissioned to create a prompt based on their own way of working. These prompts can be classroom activities.
The Contemporary Clay Foundation is an artist driven, not for profit organization set up to support and elevate clay-based art practices as well as build informed audiences for national and international ceramic art in the country. The Indian Ceramics Triennale exemplifies the vision of the Foundation in pursuing creative excellence. 19 January to
31 March, 2024
Indian Ceramics Triennale’s
second edition,
Common Ground, New Delhi. We are separated by politics, history and privilege, and the ground upon which we walk is uneven;
yet we are bound by a common humanity and a codependent future. Common Ground is a metaphorical and literal exploration of this ground upon which we meet.
Dr. Kavita Singh (1964-2023) was one of the most remarkable and influential art historians of our times. Kavita was associated with the School of Arts and Aesthetics (SAA) at JNU, where she taught since it was founded in 2001 up until a few months back. At SAA, she taught courses on the history of Indian painting and the history and politics of museums in South Asia.. She was amongst the rare kind of scholars – scholars who had the spine to speak out whenever necessary and who stood by their beliefs. She spoke out when things started deteriorating at JNU. While accepting the Infosys Prize, she said, “We never had much money or facilities, but we had excellent colleagues and academic freedom. Today, things are bad; things are comically bad in my institutional home. How bad you may ask? After I came to Bengaluru, I checked my e-mail and found that the leave application I had put in to come here and receive the award had been rejected by my vice-chancellor. So please be warned that my presence on this stage today is illegitimate.”