What is to be done. Lenin, Artistic research, and the next step of practice.
Masterclass by Premjish Achari
Date: Saturday 23 May 2026
Time: 4 to 6 PM
About the Masterclass:
As extended part of the A4A Sonalika Virtual Residency 2025, this in-person
masterclass invites participants to the talk and masterclass led by art curator Premjish Achari, this is a session for artists who want to think harder about what they are doing and why, and what it would take to do it differently.
What Is to Be Done? Lenin, Artistic Research, and the Next Step of Practice
Synopsis: In 1902, Lenin asked a deceptively simple question, ‘What is to be done?’, and produced one of the most precise analyses of why intelligent, urgent, and committed movements fail to become consequential. This masterclass borrows that question for a very different but structurally similar problem: why does artistic practice, however urgent, intelligent, and ethically serious, so often remain captured by the very systems it seeks to question? Drawing on Lenin’s distinction between spontaneous response and organized consciousness, the session proposes a framework for thinking the “next steps” of artistic research radically, understanding the dialectical tension between thought and material constraint, planning practice as sustained inquiry rather than a sequence of projects, and building the collaborative and institutional structures through which serious artistic research becomes durable.
About Premjish : Premjish Achari is a Delhi-based curator and writer whose practice engages critically with contemporary art and pedagogy. His recent curatorial projects include Imperial Silhouettes (Abu Dhabi, 2024–25), Luminous Reveries (Delhi, 2024), Inscapes and Things Are Vanishing Before Us (2023), and the Student’s Biennale (Kochi, 2022–23). He also curated All Canaries Bear Watching (GRID Heritage Project, JNU) and A Time for Farewells (Haverford College and Prameya Art Foundation). He served as Editorial Supervisor and Programme Head for Lokame Tharavadu (2021). Recipient of the Pro Helvetia Art Writers’ Award and Prameya Art Foundation’s Art Scribes Award, he has undertaken residencies at Atelier Mondial, Basel, and Château de La Napoule, France.
His writings appear in Journal for Artistic Research, Unframed, and Delhi Art Gallery publications. Premjish initiated Kaee Kolkata City Lab and Odisha Craft Odyssey and formerly taught at Shiv Nadar University.
He is currently Curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi.
Venue: Art for Art Foundation, W-114,
Greater Kailash II, New Delhi – 110048
Time: All-day workshop
Registration: Free
Open to final-year Fine Arts graduates, recent graduates, and current Master’s students in Fine Arts.
