Ankur Yadav

“This film is an enclosure of a larger work in progress. It is open to interpretation.”
Ankur Yadav, mentored by Pushpamala N, has created a narrative montage set in an empty waiting room, titled ‘Who Absorbs The Anger’. In this piece, he weaves together poetry, a rendition of a Rajasthani folktale called ‘Patta Tilla’, collected by Vijay Dan Detha, and an economic externality graph by Tim Choy, to address the unseen violence of extractive capitalism and oppressive ideological systems.

Formally trained as a painter, Ankur has worked on his third film with a process-led mindset, where he is becoming aware of how certain elements could strengthen his concept and process without overcomplicating it. The work on display reflects Pushpamala N’s insights that forged Ankur to gain clarity on the broader contexts around his artistic practice by using local narratives and sociological references. On a personal level, during the residency period, Ankur relocated to Gurgaon from Behror, which has been his longstanding site of artistic exploration. This shift in location also influenced the film’s ideas about navigating bureaucratic oppression in an extractive urban landscape. So far, Ankur’s artistic practice has been focused on Behror’s ecological crisis overlapping with social systems, merging his personal voice with the collective experience of constructing alternative perspectives and dialogues that question these dominant structures.

During the residency, Pushpamala N supported Ankur in an in-depth reflection of his practice to identify the key craft elements from his previous films, eco-poetry and installations, encouraging him to fully commit to his existing ideas.
Through this 9-minute montage, Ankur welcomes you to discover your personal story within this collective system.

Ankur Yadav is an artist and poet based in Rajasthan, India. Trained as a painter, his practice extends across film, poetry, scenographic installations, and site-specific Interventions. He graduated in Fine Arts from Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, and completed his post-graduation from the Faculty of Visual Arts, MSU Baroda. His work aims to subvert dominant narratives of exploitative capitalist practices, colonial knowledge systems, and oppressive regional politics and ideologies, which have degraded the environment of his native region, Behror in Rajasthan.

Ankur has developed his practice further through various international residencies abroad and received awards and grants, such as the Prince Claus Seed Award (Netherlands), Inlaks Fine Art Award (India), FICA–MMF Emerging Artist Award (India), Art for Hope Grant – Hyundai Motor Foundation (India), Generator Experimenter Grant (India), Ravi Jain Memorial Fellowship, Dhoomimal Gallery (India).

Lipi Wadhawan

“I want to show my experience of these images and understand the subjective responses of viewers to
them, through little experiments.”

Lipi Wadhwan, mentored by Premjish Achari, examines image viewing and its meaning-making in found photographs, which allows viewers a field of interpretative possibility beyond a rational factual reality.

Working with found objects, images, textual fragments, and reclaimed matter has been central to Lipi’s work. During the residency, Lipi revisited the photographs and studio images that she had found in Dadri three years ago. For the past few years, these unclaimed photographs remained central to her artistic research, but ethical concerns raised around authorship, consent and context held her back. Throughout the residency, Lipi developed a sound understanding of how these images can be approached responsibly, with room for subjective meanings to exist beyond the original context.

Lipi has attempted to subvert the usual ethical concerns in sharing these found photographs publicly, posing the questions: Is there a singular correct way of reading and making meaning of a found photograph and whether not showing these photographs problematic as showing them? This mentorship has widened the scope of Lipi’s initial speculative reading of the photographs, centred on the factual details of identity, location and occasion, expanding it to the “affective charge” and “social weight” that they may have on a viewer. She considers these images as
“complex, temporal and affective events”. 

In the displayed photographs, Lipi employs the countervisual method of digital distortion to challenge what is visible and known to generate an emotional effect on the viewers. Going forward, she will be using various other countervisual methods like blurring, pixelation, abstraction, layering, fragmentation and erasure, reflecting how an image undergoes multiple “layers of manipulation”, unknown to the viewer before it reaches them. Lipi Wadhwan invites you to read these photographs as you like, and piece together two photographic puzzles.

Lipi Wadhawan is a New Delhi-based visual artist and educator whose practice explores the intersections of memory, material, image, and the self. With an MFA from Shiv Nadar University, her work examines emotional and sensory terrains shaped by absence, longing, rupture, and the paradoxes of belonging. Through found objects, images, textual fragments, and reclaimed matter, she investigates the remnants of imagined futures or elusive pasts that become vessels for memory, affect, and speculative meaning. Her process-based and research-driven practice is an ongoing attempt to understand intangibility and loss, and how such loss shapes the present through inherited or imagined narratives.

Her practice negotiates with erasure, and the tension between revealing and withholding. Her work has been exhibited at the Ravi Jain Memorial Awards (2025), Kochi Students’ Biennale (2022), Ras Al Khaimah Fine Arts Festival (2022, 2023), and I Non–I and the Other at Wetlands Art Space (2024).

 

Praveen Sagar Dindi

“I am emotionally connected to the river, and I have undertaken the responsibility to showcase the apocalypse it is undergoing.”
Dindi Praveen Sagar, mentored by Atul Bhalla, surveys the Musi River as a dystopian site through his mixed media work and installations. As part of the youth-led people’s movement, Save Musi Movement, Dindi has been closely observing the Musi River for the past 4 years, and his work exemplifies his advocacy. With the guidance of Atul, Dindi carried the site-specific documentation of the banks of the Musi River, capturing upclose sights of severe pollution caused by industrial, sewage and plastic waste. This meticulous photographic documentation surreally translates into Dindi’s mixed media works.

During the residency, Dindi experienced a few firsts. Suggestive text makes an appearance in his paintings in addition to geometric shapes, object symbolism and abstract iconography. The installation on display marks the first of his practice so far, thereby introducing a new form and expression.

The A4A residency further opened up an imagination-led and intellectual approach for Dindi to showcase the reality of urban entanglement with the river’s life through an installation mapping the geography. His terracotta sculptures depict the presence of natural aquatic life, striving to survive as the river collapses in the face of urban decay. Dindi aims to truly convey what the collapse of the Musi River looks like and how it continues while you are witnessing his work.

Dindi Praveen Sagar is a Hyderabad-based visual artist. He completed his Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University in 2022, and he is currently pursuing his final year Master’s at JNAFAU, Hyderabad. His ongoing practice investigates the entanglement of human agency, ecological systems and social crisis structures through drawings, mixed media works and installation. His current works operate within an abstracted spatial logic, employing illusory depth and fragmented forms to evoke traversing nature in decay. His work was recently exhibited at Kochi Student’s Biennale and other group exhibitions include Black Moon at Nehru Art Gallery, Hyderabad (2025), New on New at Champatree Art Gallery, New Delhi (2025), Lonely Planet and State Art Gallery, Hyderabad (2024). He has connected with other artists working on similar themes at the Arthshila Residency at Parivartan Bihar (2024).

 

Simi Deka

“I explore the fragility and beauty of these aquatic networks, inviting viewers to consider the delicate balance that sustains both ecological and social systems.”

Simi Deka, guided by Vibha Malhotra, captures the “aesthetics of gathering” in submerged lowland ecosystems of Jorhat, Assam. With precise observation and material study, she has documented the choreography of aquatic flora in her paintings. During the residency, Vibha’s guidance has helped Simi to let her fascination with water bodies liberally guide the trajectory of this body of work, rather than the need to give it form and meaning through a specific social or ecological cause. This work reminds us that the essential first step in addressing the deterioration of our natural spaces is to notice them more intentionally and attentively.

Through reflection and sharing inspirations from other artists working with nature, Vibha has brought conceptual strength to Simi’s longstanding personal relationship with water bodies around her. Simi has taken copious notes, which transmuted into a new form of expression poetry, further making sense of her ideas. In addition to her existing practice in painting, during the residency period, Simi is foraying into creating sculptural forms, turning material exploration into a matter of play. She uses natural materials like coir (coconut fibre), coastal marsh grass, and fibres extracted from banana stems, mixed with paper pulp to create papier-mache forms.

Simi seeks to blur the lines between nature and human society, how nature’s quiet interdependence mirrors our ways of forming communities, negotiating space, and existing in harmony or tension. Through this work, Simi Deka draws your attention towards the rich intricacies of assembling and intertwining natural materials.

Simi Deka is a visual practitioner based in Assam. Her paintings engage ecological and social narratives of lowland water bodies, attending to form, texture and pattern in wetland ecologies. Through close observation and study of natural materials, she wants to evoke a sense of place, memory and environmental consciousness. With an ongoing interest in community-based art, she aims to create visuals that both celebrate and question our relationship with the natural world.
She has completed her BFA from I.S.K.V. Khairagarh and MFA from Kalyani University, Calcutta. She has been awarded the Chotamota Foundation Master Crafter Award in 2024 & 2025. Her work has been exhibited at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture Annual exhibition (2024), The Indian Society of Oriental Art Annual Exhibition (2025) and CIMA Art Mela, Kolkata (2025).