ART FOR ART VIRTUAL RESIDENCY & MENTORSHIP 2024

SELECTED ARTISTS

 

Arindam Manna 

(born 1994) is an artist born in Suri, West Bengal, India. He graduated with a BFA in painting from Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, in 2014-2018. After that he did his MFA from Shiv Nadar University, Uttar Pradesh in 2020. Arindam is currently continuing his work in Delhi. The projects revolve around complex concerns and are an extension and continuation of his main project that he started in 2018. Arindam’s project, “Transience and Materiality,” was initiated during his research in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, on Grand Trunk Road. He came across several migration stories and witnessed spaces and lives in flux, a phenomenon that is amplified in small mufassil towns and villages like Dadri and Chithera. This same road transforms into National Highway 19, which traverses the Birbhum region of Bengal and the town of Suri (old NH 19), where he lives. His processes evolve from temporality and immersion in the worlds that the road and its traversal of the subcontinent contain. Time plays an important role in these experiences, and therefore the observation of the traces of time became a central theme of his research. He seeks to explore the relationship between image and body through a process in which pen and cell phone become intimate instruments/devices that transcend drawing, video, and photography. From the multiple relationships that emerge, he seeks to collect and explore his language through the process of mark-making, performativity, video, photography, and the nature of installation. Mobility is the core from which all these things develop. His practice evolves through questioning the present, where the boundaries between personal and collective memory blur.

 

Mohd. Intiyaz

is a visual practitioner based in Delhi. His body of work is concerned with the ideas of memory, social disparities and politics of control and violence. Being a witness to experiences of displacement at a very young age, along with his family, he had to migrate from Sahibganj (a remote village in Jharkhand, India). Subjected to the harsh living conditions of Delhi slums, he had to constantly negotiate with social disparities and challenges that life had to pose on a day-to-day basis. His work borrows from such lived experiences, challenges and everyday negotiations. His work critically engages with the public and explores varied meanings and events of public gatherings. It is filled with figurative forms, layers, patterns, and camouflage of elements that seek inclination/inspiration from the city’s flora, fauna, architecture and surroundings. He engages with different mediums in his practice, ranging from murals and drawings to installations. He experiments with/ utilizes found objects, upcycled textiles, and sack bags to depict his concerns. His engagement highlights the ignorant attitude of the dominant and simultaneously speculates alternative futures where plurality is embraced.

 

Shilpeksh G Khalorkar

is native to Amravati, Maharashtra. He completed his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Visual Arts from the Department of Sculpture, Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda. His current art practice is based on his Pandemonium state of mind, and he uses the metaphor of the termite biting process with subjects in existential crisis. Art has always been used as an expression throughout history; it intervenes the emotions and ideas and reveals the reflection of individual and collective circumstances through forms, painting, music, and literature. The mind is a space where ungovernable thoughts are born by grasping our surroundings through our senses. Shilpeksh’s practice is on traumatic episodes of his home and family problems within home which induce anxiety, fear and how it has left an impact on him. Diving deep into his psyche and griping the constantly haunting thoughts that create chaos, which has left an impression on his subconscious, while being alone and visiting certain spaces recalls a few past traumatic memories and thoughts that haunt him. However, some distressing past experiences and memories are responsible for shaping a behavioural pattern in a person. He wants to address these anxious and fearful events which are also responsible for the pandemonium state of his mind through his body of work. His Art practice sheds light on his current turbulent state of mind leading him to an existential crisis. Through visual representation and metaphors, he has depicted a chaotic state of his mind in the present time and space, being away from his home. He engages with different mediums and experiments with new materials. His practice includes materials such as cardboard, wood, and paper and the termite biting treatment on the surface. The rendering of thoughts is metaphorically represented by surface treatment of termite biting.

Vanshika Babbar

works with video and video/AR installations, painting, zines, to name a few. Her material ranges from found footage and objects collected from popular media sources and domestic spaces. While her thematic concerns have varied, Vanshika’s underlying interests emerge out of the need for interrogating the condition of middle-classness and its isolation from history, the social absurdities of life under the Capital Relation, and the ideological mediations that pervade everyday life at the levels of the personal, familial and social. Her practice engages with the political dimensions of subjective formations, such as the interface between the referential and experiential, objective and subjective, universal and particular realms. It gained momentum when she started recollecting her past and the creative resistance generated by its persisting presence. She attempts to observe the multiple acts, performances, and operations of power in interpersonal relationships and grasp the inarticulable in larger cultural statements through her works. In her paintings, she translates her abovementioned inquiries onto closeups of the face, which allows her to offer the world as an affective surface to be seen and read, as sites of dilemmas and encounters with the outside world. In that sense her paintings can be seen as caricatures, which try to uncover from within the notional regularities of the face, traces of impending biases and certain disavowed truths, thereby giving a face to governmentality. Her enquiries often begin with the observation of the basic antinomies of existence and feelings of unbelongingness; and her video/ installation works and paintings, in their intuitive perception of the absurd, attempt to unconceal or grapple with the fragmented, visceral, intensive, and vulnerable aspects of the human condition. The material she collects- be it found footage, objects, popular images, to name a few- organises itself in the works in a series of contradictions, a humorous set of events, or ironies that do not necessarily resolve into larger wholes. Humour and Contradiction as aesthetic and political tools allow the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate representations so that the material’s Other can speak. Humour itself is a contradiction between the frameworks we inherit and the frameworks we comply with; and she is particularly interested in it because it reflects a struggle for agency and an imbalance of power but still manages to escape the binaries of hope and despair.

 

Residency — Overview

VIRTUAL RESIDENCY & MENTORSHIP 
2024

A4A is offering two cycles of three-month virtual residencies per year for four emerging Indian artists (each cycle). The program provides basic financial support and mentorship to these artists without requiring them to leave their personal creative space. Each artist receives a monthly stipend of INR 10,000 to aid their artistic endeavours. In addition to financial support, the residency includes a unique mentorship component, allowing each artist to engage in once-a-month online sessions with a senior arts practitioner. The mentorship is tailored to the needs and interests of the mentee and can involve established artists, renowned writers, or distinguished curators. The program is dedicated to creating a nurturing and supportive environment that encourages artistic exploration and professional growth.