Chapter 1 | Area : Pune, India
Poonam Jain |India
Poonam Jain was born in Bangalore (1989) to a Jain family. Aspiring to become a Jain nun, she joined art school almost by chance, just because she liked drawing. It was the art school and people whom she met and learnt about that expanded her worldview. The process of questioning and un/re learning the ‘taught’ becomes the essence of her drawings, installations, sculptures and gestural works. She often shifts personal experiences to social concerns and vise-a-versa. With repetition, counting and measuring, she analyses domestic (micro) narratives as dialogues between economy and pedagogy. She was a resident at Art Dubai 2018 and currently lives and works in Bombay. (text credit : sapar contemporary) |
Rhine Bernardino|UK/ Phillipines
Rhine grew up in the Philippines where she studied Political Science, ending up with a Bachelors Degree in Film and Audio Visual Communication at the University of the Philippines (Diliman). She is the first and currently the only Filipino artist who graduated with an MA Fine Art degree (Sculpture) at the Royal College of Art, for which she was awarded the highly-regarded Abraaj RCA Innovation Scholarship. She received a Distinction for her dissertation research on exploring possibilities of contemporary art practice in the rural context and communities vis-a-vis urban practices. Rhine sees herself as a social worker, constantly moving, exploring and learning about various cultures, customs and ways of living. She’s lived and worked with different types of communities wherein she learned not just to put value in togetherness but also to place utmost importance in solitude, silence and contemplation. To her, passion can only have a meaningful impact if it is accompanied and strengthened with compassion. rhinebernardino.com |
Tamara De Laval | Sweden
Tamara de Laval is a painter from Malmö, Sweden who graduated MFA from Royal College of Art, Stockholm in 1981 and has since worked full time as painter and later occasionally as free lance curator.In 2003 she started the artist group Meteor, with senior and younger artists collaborating on art projects in public space.Meteor are part of The Area,a group of artists working as a platform for social art projects in the stigmatized area of Sofielund in southern part of Malmö. Tamara has exhibited widely since the 1980s in Sweden,India and in other countries like Mexico, Colombia,US,Egypt,Denmark,Germany,Norway,France. In India curated Sites of Recurrence at Dakshinachitra 1n 2003 and curated the workshop and seminar Fluid Signs,Perceptions and Identity at Dakshinachitra and Lalit Kala,Chennai.My work deals with life experience, ongoing conflicts in the world, and feminism. I agree with Deleuze and Guattari's discussions of the negative effects of patriarchal systems on women's independence and control over their bodies. I also find inspiration in their theories of rhizomatic, nonhierarchical and nonchronological ways of thinking, collaborating, making connections and disseminating ideas. www.tamaradelaval.com |
Marko Cesarec| Sweden
Marko is a visual artist and has been involved in a number of exhibitions, events in Sweden and abroad for a long time with a focus on painting, drawing, installations and objects and a member of the artist group Meteor that creates art exibitions, workshops, projects in unexpected public urban spaces. He has recently worked as a curator with the exhibition "Gradually shifted acceptance" and showed the art work “Threats in industrial cities” at “Art Evening Lund”, Sweden. In his work Marko is looking for the irrationality, inexplicability and mysteries in the existence, thoughts, formulations that emerge, evoke comments, contradictions, opposites. Nature does not want to please, but we will always be a part of it. A work that also wants to show, be tools for, nature's right to exist and look for their non-controllable paths, trying to open a portal to another dimension to master the growing environmental threat, militarization and inhumanity. www.markocesarec.se |
Hediyeh Azma | Iran/Norway
Hediyeh is an award-winning choreographer and member of International Dance Council (CID) of Paris with 21-year experience in the field of Iranian National dance. She has also trained in Modern, Contemporary and Classical Ballet. Choreographing numerous pieces, she had gained prizes as the ‘Best performer’ and ‘Best Director’ in the reputed Movement Festival called ‘Point’, based in Iran. Parallel to her artistic career, she runs the first dance school in Iran, called ‘Deir’, founded in 2009. A fellowship on Entrepreneurship in Sweden also, honed her career as founder of her school. To expand her academic strength as the first Iranian, Hediyeh terminated her Masters in Dancer Knowledge Practice and Heritage (Choreomundus) on 2018. In her thesis she looks at the relationship between audience and dancers in the context of audience participatory performances. Using her choreographic experience, her recent activities explored different choreography related projects: Imkaan an Indo-Iranian photo-dance project was successfully curated by her in Szeged, Hungary in 2017 and Saraab as her first experience in screen-dance presented on different international platforms such as San-Souci Festival of Dance Cinema in 2018. Sumedha Bhattacharyya | India Professionally, a B.tech in Electronics Engineering, a BA in Sociology , a PGDM in Liberal Arts as an Young India Fellow under Ashoka University, Sumedha has been passionate about dance. As an ICCR empanelled Kathak Performing Artist and a member of International Dance Council (UNESCO), she is trained under Jaipur and Lucknow Gharana(styles) under Guru Shashi Sankhla, Saswati Sen and Paramita Maitra. Graduating this year , she was the only Indian scholarship holder for pursuing a Masters in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage under Erasmus Mundus European Union scholarship in Norway, France, Hungary and London. She has been always curious about depicting multiple perspective of one single concept. Her Kathak-informed body and a photographer-informed mind led her interest towards a creative expressions which involves the performing and the visual. Saraab : Mirage her first Dance film, on Death and belonging was selected for screening at San Souci Festival for Dance Cinema 2018. Imkaan , an Indo-Iranian collaboration a photo-dance exhibition on Underground dancing in Iran, was presented in Szeged, Hungary and Ashoka Art Gallery, Ashoka University. |
Julien Juhlin|Denmark
Julian Toldam Juhlin Danish artist and set designer, b. 1987. Juhlin completed his education as a professional scenographer in 2014. Juhlin has since then worked as a set - and costume designer on a wide range of theatres in Denmark including The Royal Danish Theatre. While at the same time developing his own very personal stories and figures, presenting them on parking lots and market squares, in the newspapers and in his childhood home. In his personal work, he is making use of staging approaches that he learned from working with stage design in order to create a kind of theatrical visual art. Juhlin is fascinated with bringing forth and staging certain purified figures that have been derived from his own life, taking his inspiration in icons. With his own body and his own personal story he is interested in anchoring the icons within physical reality. Icons, in Juhlins view, are keyholes for looking into the luminous eternity, and his figures, accordingly, are frequently tragic attempts to come into contact with the timeless world, to get time to grind to a halt. He is placing the figures within time bubbles and tableaus, in an attempt to freeze particular stages in his life – often with the tragic consequences it has when one tries to hold tightly onto something beautiful – like capturing a bird in a golden cage. |
Prabhakar Pachpute |India
The Indian artist Prabhakar Pachpute’s work is strongly rooted in the experiences his family has gone through in their daily lives as coal miners. Life Prabhakar Pachpute was born in the village of Sasti in Chandrapur district in Maharashtra. The town is essentially known as a mining town, which is its only industry. Pachpute is descended from three generations who have consecutively worked in the mines of what has come to be called the “city of black gold.” Though he is familiar with the mines and the extreme difficulty working in them entails, he himself did not work there. He had always had a facility for drawing and working with his hands, and decided to enroll at the Khairagarh University for his Bachelors in Fine Arts degree. He chose sculpture as his medium, and graduated in 2009. He had been given the Certificate Award from the S.C.Z.C.C. in Nagpur the previous year. Prabhakar moved to Baroda soon after graduating to join the M.S. University, where he again studied sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, receiving his Masters in Fine Arts in 2011. The Professor Mahendra Pandya Foundation Award had been presented to him in 2010, when he was still in the middle of his M.F.A. He had also had his first exhibition that year, at the Red Earth Gallery in Baroda. |
Sabitha Sofia Söderholm |Denmark
Sabitha Sofia Söderholm is an indian/danish artist and writer, she was adopted at the age of four from Tamil Nadu and grew up in Copenhagen. Her art is an exploration of her motherland India, a way to find her place in the land she was born. Through poetry and embroidering she tries to weave her two countries into a country of her own. Her art is defined by the sun and the snow and the restlessness of being torn between two places. |
Avon Bashida | Denmark/US
Avon Bashida (DK/US b. 1986) is a multi-medium artist working from the fields of performance, photography, video and painting. explores the human body and mind, researching anthropology and psychology within art theory through expression of her artistic practice. Bashida holds a BA (Honours) in Photographic Arts from University of Westminster in London and a MA in Performance Studies from Tisch New York University. Bashida’s performances are expressions of physical forms which are created through paint, photography, video and documentation. The works are depictions of how the human race experiences itself—opposite of how it is placed in the world regarding gender, race, geography and intimacy. By referring to both anthropological and psychological studies, Bashida unpacks human existence by pushing cultural ideals and physical boundaries flipping stereotypes using the body. A key element in Bashida's work is how the subjectivity of the human mind makes the onlookers incapable of experience without a pre-distinct approach, disposing our relation to others only through the understanding of ourselves. |
Taxi - suman S. and Sourav R.C. | India
Sourav roy chowdhury & suman samajpati have been working collaboratively as ‘taxi’ since 2007. Taxi employs photography, hand-painted photography, video and sound as the forms of their visual expression. Suman studied fashion and textile design at national institute of fashion technology, kolkata and received a diploma in graphic design from birla institute of liberal arts in kolkata. Sourav completed his ma in political science at burdwan university. Their works have been exhibited in india and abroad and have also been selected in numerous international festivals in usa, uk, spain, russia, macau, cuba, germany, bosnia & herzegovina, poland, france, macedonia and the netherlands including noorderlicht photofestival 2012. They have also participated at the 16th biennial of cerveira 2011, portugal. They live and work in kolkata, india. taxiart.net |
Arijit Bhattacharya| India
Arijit trained as a painter, a practice that is extremely autonomic, and believes in individualism. He believe "It was art history, the politics of art making and its social relevance that made me question the training I was receiving. This questioning lead me to look into the world outside of art practice. I understood that social structures in my country are interdependent and based upon social collaboration. The ideas of caste, class, sex are extremely important for me to grasp from my surroundings. To reflect upon the enormous socio-econimic changes that were happening around me. Therefore the training offered distance from the people and their lived experience I considered I was a part of. This helped step out of my studio.", Arijit B. finished his M.V.A from MSU, Baroda. In collaboration with Balaram Koley, he is a multidisciplinary artist. He is trained as a sculptor but works beyond the idea of material in physical forms of sculptural executions. His works revolve around the farming communities around India and the problems they have been facing in recent past.Balaram has completed his M.V.A from M.S.U Baroda. |
Afsana S. Zumpa| Bangladesh
Afsana Sharmin (b.1984, Chittagong) is an emerging contemporary artist whose practice based on sculpture and drawing with various kinds of new art form likes installation, performance Art, Land Art and video. She completed her MFA and B F A degree, majored in sculpture from Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong. Afsana was an active admin member of ‘Porapara space for Artists’ organization (from 2008-2012) which works with the contemporary artists and art media.Her work advanced with her self-examined nature and femininity. She showed a marked tendency for overlapping her performance based videos with installations that were often cloaked in an affective sensibility. Basically she works from the experience of her own life and surrounding. Meanwhile her works are poetic by her nature. aszhuma.wordpress.com |
Yogesh Barve| India
Yogesh Barve lives and works in Mumbai, India. He studied Leather Technology at the Polytechnic College, Mumbai, from 2005-08; and Fine Arts at Rachana Sansad AFAC, Mumbai, from 2009-14. His artistic practice ranges from painting and printing to sculpture, film, multimedia installations and site-specific works. He is currently working on a Dalit Poetry and Literature channel on YouTube. While stylistically varied, a common thread throughout his work is a critique of cultural frameworks of thinking. He uses the idea of the backslash in the form of un/learning, de/constructing and non/conformism as thinking and working methods. Utilising a range of materials including found objects, participatory technologies such as his mobile phone cam and game engines, he opens up new aesthetic views that deal with social phenomena such as inequality, irrationality the unseen or the in/outsider. |
Natacha Voliakovsky | Argentina
Natacha Voliakovsky (Buenos Aires, 1988) is a visual and performance artist. She holds a degree in graphic design and communication (Universidad de Buenos Aires) and has studied two years of the Bachelor of Visual Arts (Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Argentina). She’s been selected to participate in multiple residencies and workshops worldwide, including the intensive workshop in performance art at Venice International Performance Art Week (2018), the contemporary art residency at Uberbau Haus, Brazil (2017), Sur Polar residence, held in Antarctica (2014), among others. Her solo shows include Pecho argentino, Supervivencia, Žena ve válce, Es una pregunta abierta, Ejercicio para la emergencia, Interferencia, lo opuesto a un momento fugaz, among others. Her works have been featured in group exhibitions in Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, the US, Italy, Czech Republic and Ukraine. She created her Performance Method, a series of training techniques for performance art. The artist’s aim is to share the techniques she herself uses to prepare body and mind before a site-specific performance. This method is available online. Her works belong in private collections. She lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. natachavoliakovsky.ru |
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Sayli Kulkarni Joshi | India
Sayeli is a Performing Artist, Choreographer and a Dance Teacher based out of Pune, India. She started her career as a Contemporary Dancer and also took formal training in Bharatnatyam (Indian Classical Dance), Kalaripayattu (Indian Martial Arts) and Indian Folk Dance. She graduated in Contemporary Dance from Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, Bangalore, India. Sayli has had the opportunity to perform in many Dance and Theatre Festivals and has worked with renowned International Choreographers in a very short period of her career. |
Vidhi Vora| India
Vidhi Vora explores the medium of live art and drawing to understand spaces and the varying dynamics between environments and self. With a narrative of being in 'corners' of conversations, she interacts with tangible surfaces and corners of walls and streets. She has participated at the Chittagong Open Art Biennale (Bangladesh), Kolkata International Performance Art Festival and Studio 365 Goa (Open Studio). |
Rupali Patil | India
RUPALI PATIL (born in 1984 in Pune) creates graphics, artistic objects, and installations. She graduated from the Graphics Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayaijaro University of Baroda (2011). She usually collaborates with Prabhakar Pachpute, creating site-specific installations that tackle the themes of agrarian cultures and global social problems. Her works were presented at exhibitions such as Eros (Parasite, University Museum and Art Gallery, Hong Kong, 2014) and Kamarado (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2015), as well as during the 14th Istanbul Biennale (2015). In 2014, Clark House Initiative in Mumbai hosted her individual exhibition Everybody Drinks but Nobody Cries. She is the member of the Shunya Art Collective. She lives and works in Mumbai and Pune. |
Keepa Masky | Nepal
Keepa Maskey finished her education from Marymount Manhattan College, NY in 1997. Her grandfather, Krishna Bahadur Chitrakar was an artist, who she would watch prepare panels of work for national events, as a child. But, it is her paternal grandmother, Nani Maiya Maskey, who has influenced her throughout her creative journey; a stern character with immaculate manual skills. Perhaps, that also explains Keepa’s prolific works on textile, which she feels is inherent to her. As her practice matured and diversified, she finds herself connecting to performance art. Keepa Maskey is currently based in Kathmandu. Keepa Masky |
Amol Patil | India
Amol K Patil (b. 1987), a conceptual and performance artist. His artwork, is an ever reaching attempt to recapture the vibrating movement and sound of the ‘chawl’ architecture in which he grew up a form of social housing for mill and factory workers built in the early 1900s, with many tenements fit together, verandahs connecting every door, the gossiping voices from dimly lit tables under which men gather to play carom, the man with a walking stick, the sound of termites eating into wood, wedding festivities, and rhythmically creaking beds. Patil has shown at Pune Biennale 2017, New Galerie in Paris 2016, Dakar Biennale,2016, Myymälä2, Helsinki, 2015; Japan Foundation, Delhi, 2015; Stedelijk Museum Bureau in Amsterdam 2014, International Artists Initiated, Glasgow, 2014; Video Art Festival, Lagos, 2014; Para Site, Hong Kong, 2014; Art Dubai Projects, 2014; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, 2013; and the Transnational Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013. |
Saviya Lopes | India
Saviya Lopes (1994) lives and works in Vasai, Bombay, India. She graduated from Rachna Sansad Academy of Fine Art, and is the youngest participating artist at Clark House Initiative where she is currently the Director. Lopes’ graduating research thesis took form of a confession in which she confronts various identities. Her works articulate a hypocrisy that we are well versed with but refuse to shed often using the cudgels of culture. She works in the context of feminism and its interventions of visual vocabulary in conceptual practice and thoroughly puts through an idea for the political. She often works with the histories of the place in which she lives as well as with her own family archives; drawing upon activities such as tapestry weaving by her grandmother as manifestations of dissent. She uses her drawings to reject religious misogyny, but also to humour the norms of patriarchy. Recent solo and group exhibitions include a pop-up show at Clark House Initiative, Bombay; Dakar Biennale; Historica - Republican Aesthetics at IMMA, Ireland; and Stories My country told me, Asia Culture Centre, Gwangju Biennale, all 2016; Gondwana Series - An intervention at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2017; Working Practices, The Showroom, London, 2018. She has been twice invited to South Korea for Gwangju Biennale as a fellow to participate and has participated as a visiting speaker at the Asia Art Space, Network Asia, Korea. |
Nikhil Raunak| India
Nikhil Raunak is a multi-discipline artist and curator who completed his graduation and masters in painting and printmaking from Sir JJ School of Art, Bombay, combining various mediums, and continuously challenging the boundaries between printmaking, sculpture, installation, painting, video and performative photography. |