Artists’ Biographies
UNDER CONSTRUCTION Anuj Daga
Avijit Mukul Kishore is a film-maker and cinematographer. He studied cinematography at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune and has a bachelors degree in history from Hindu College, Delhi. His practice overlaps the disciplines of documentary, moving-image art practice and cinema pedagogy. His films as director include Squeeze Lime in Your Eye, The Garden of Forgotten Snow, Nostalgia for the Future, Electric Shadows, Vertical City, Certified Universal and Snapshots from a Family Album.
Karthik Dondeti is a practicing architect and founder of Voxelscapes - an Architecture and Computational Design studio, and Pixel Tectonics - a code art studio based in Bangalore. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Architecture from the SPA, New Delhi and a Masters Degree focusing on Design and Technology from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Karthik is passionate about operating at the intersection of the Digital and the Analogue and is currently working towards incorporating algorithmic design processes in the domains of Art and Architecture.
Nisha Nair-Gupta is an architect with a Master’s degree in Humanities and Art Journalism from CEPT, Ahmedabad. She currently spearheads the design studio Design [Variable] and a research initiative, The People Place Project. Nisha uses writing as a tool for documentation and mapping along with other media like photography, sketching, oral narrations, etc. A cultural practitioner, her work involves curation and publishing, and she also conducts writing courses at various architecture colleges.
Pratap Morey is a Mumbai-based artist with a post-graduate diploma in Indian Aesthetics from Mumbai University and a graduate degree in Fine Art from Vasai Vikasini College of Visual Arts. Pratap has lived and worked in Mumbai for the most part of his life, and has been constantly displaced by the city’s shifting façades. He seeks inspiration from his immediate surroundings, exploring the spatial existence of its residents and the dualism of a colossal urban sprawl where vacant spaces are rapidly transformed into formidable structures.
Poonam Jain (1989) is a Bangalore-born Mumbai-based artist who joined art school almost by chance – a space that comes to shape her worldview. The process of questioning and un/re learning drives her drawings, installations, sculptures and gestural works. By employing methods of repetition, counting and measuring, her visual works acquire a distinct vocabulary that bridge several domains of art, architecture and theosophy. She has been an resident at Art Dubai 2018. She was a member of Clark house Initiative, Bombay from 2011 to 2016. Some of her group exhibitions were in Sapar contemporary, NY; New Gallery, Paris; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; INSERT 2014, New Delhi; GdanskaGaleria Miejska 2, Poland; MKG127, Canada. She has had solo exhibitions in Clark House Initiative, Bombay, 1X1 Art Gallery, Dubai.
Ritesh Uttamchandani began his journey as a photographer watching his elder sister take photos of his family. However, he didn’t register it back then and began his journey as a professional only in 2004 as an intern at the Indian Express. In his decade-long experience as a photojournalist, he has reported and documented some of the major events of national and international importance in the Indian subcontinent and has recently self-published his first photo book, The Red Cat and Other Stories, which looks at the city of Bombay through the lens of a fable his mother used to narrate to him when he was a child. The book, equal parts travelogue and journalism, is a tribute to the beauty in the mundane.
Shreyank Khemalapure has completed his post-graduation from The Berlage, Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design, Netherlands in 2014. He completed his undergraduate studies from G.I.T, Belgaum in 2009. He works on projects ranging from architectural competitions to architectural films under the umbrella of Room for Architecture. He is also a research director at ‘SPARE’ a research wing initiated by sP+a. Currently he is teaching at School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai.
Acknowledgements. Prasad Shetty, Riyas Komu, Rohan Shivkumar, Rupali Gupte
MAKING PLACE Aziz Sohail
Sandip Kuriakose graduated with an MVA (Painting) from MS University, Baroda (2014) and a BFA (Painting) from the College of Art, New Delhi. Shows include FotoFest International 2018 Biennial Central Exhibition INDIA - Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art, Houston; Regimes of Truth, Gati Dance Forum, New Delhi; Against the Order Of, Clark House Initiative, Mumbai; The 6th European Month of Photography, Das Foto Image Factory, Berlin; Art For Young Collectors, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai; and United Art Fair, New Delhi among others. Residencies include Clark House Initiative (2018), CONA Foundation (2018), TIFA Working Studios (2018) and the Summer Residency Program, School of Visual Arts (2013). He lives and works in New Delhi.
Fazal Rizvi graduated from NCA Lahore with a BFA, and is an interdisciplinary artist exploring notions of memory, loss, erasures, migration etc within his practice. He was selected for the Arcus Project Residency, Japan 2011 and was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust and British Council Residency at Gasworks, London 2014, and Vasl International Artist Residency 2015. Karachi. Rizvi also recently showed at the Karachi and Lahore Biennales and teaches at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi.
BODY AS ARCHIVE Hediyeh Azma + Sumedha Bhattacharya
Hediyeh Azma:
Mehran Golmohamadi is an independent filmmaker and photographer. He holds a B.A in Theater and Performance Art from Sooreh University of Tehran and is certified as a member of the Young Community of Cinema in Tehran. He was a jury board member for Kharazmi Festival, Film and Photography Section from 2012 to 2014. Some of his recent national and international productions within the area of theatre and animation include Parrot and the Merchant at Spielart art festival in Munchen 2015 and Some Capris for Violin for the 23rd International Fajr Theater Festival in Iran 2013. He worked as the filmmaker for the current project of Body as Archive.
Aida Mirzakhani & Marzieh Jafarpour completed their B.A. in Stage and Dress Design at Tehran Art University. As members of NIB Design Group, they continued their collaboration on different projects within the areas of dress design, installation art and scenic design. Their first installation production was at Fadjr Visual Art Festival 2017, which gained attention and resulted in a group exhibition at the Artists' House in Tehran on 2017. Aida was nominated as the best dress designer at the Monologue Theatre festival 2017 and Marzieh won the best Stage and Dress designer’s prize at the Nahal International Film Festival 2017. Their recent works focus mostly on Installation art. Their last collaboration resulted in the Body as Archive’s installation. The dress design of the project was also done by Aida.
Acknowledgments. Sepideh Nicknafs, Professor Emeritus Egil Bakka and Gediminas Karoblis, Naveen Mahantesh, Asqar Faridi Masouleh, Alieh Foroughi and Mohsen Goudarzi, Yeganeh Kamar Khani, Rojin Mansouri, Yasmin Vafaei, Shabnam Kermani and Dr. Aria Rahmati.
Sumedha Bhattacharya:
Anurag Dasgupta, based in India, is a graduate of Srishti school of art, design and technology with specialisation in digital filmmaking where he delved into documentary, experimental and fiction filmmaking. Taking advantage of the digital revolution he created an independent filmmaking setup in Delhi called Growling Pixels out of which he created music videos, activist documentaries and fiction films.His main interest lies in mysticism, bridging the gap between sensory perception of art and cinema and our instincts, animal and ecological welfare.
His work can be found at https://www.anuragdasgupta.com/
Nooreen Riaz Ahmed, is an architect and an urban designer based out of Delhi. She uses illustration and free hand sketching as a medium of expression in her work. She works as a freelance visualizer consultant for multiple think tanks. Her main body of work lies in capturing urbanscapes and dynamic forms of street interactions in Indian cities. She likes to bring a piece of every place she visits in her travel journals through a combination of tangible and intangible forms of memory. She likes to combine different materiality and mediums in her work. She currently works as a project associate at the Department of Urban Design in School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi.
Shoummo Saha is part of the Under the Border Movement platform that aims to encourage interaction between the electronic music scenes of South Asia and German. Shoummo started his journey as a sound designer. Currently he is working with generative music which is a genre that works with real time music generation.
Vishnupriya Rajgarhia is the recipient of the Levett Scholarship and an MFA Candidate at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Her practice can be viewed as a continuous engagement with questions regarding identity, the human condition and its intersectionalities with society. Her research is intertwined with her practice and probes into institutions in the world of art, their connections and their implication in art and the world at large. She hopes to start a dialogue with the viewer, treating her work as an experiential catalyst. Her choice of mediums include, installations, text, photography, zines videos and performance art.
Acknowledgments. My gurus, Aditi Mangaldas and Paramita Maitra, Shashi Sankhla, Vikram Iyengar, Naveen Mahantesh, Anurag, Nooreen and Shoummo, Dr. Margaret Walker, Lubna Marium, Urmimala Sarkar, Sanjeev Chatterjee, Anushesh Anedil, and Khan Chacha (costume designer).
COULD-BE URBANISM Naveen Mahantesh
Rashmi Sawhney is a Bangalore-based academic whose work deals with cinema and visual culture. She is currently an Associate Professor in Film and Cultural Studies at Christ University, Bangalore. She has published widely on cinema, visual culture, and film historiography, and is a contributing editor for a special issue of the Moving Image Review and Arts Journal, on South Asian Artists Film and Video (published by Intellect, UK in 2018), and a special issue on Science Fiction for the journal South Asian Film and Media Studies (published by Intellect, UK in 2015). Rashmi’s interest in science fiction accompanies her explorations of the relationship between history, the future and the present. She sees science and speculative fictions as being ideological terrains as well as political processes through which collective social futures can be imagined. She has also been interested in the intersections between popular cinema and the visual arts and their increasingly overlapping global trajectories.
Kaushik Bhaumik is Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has been Deputy Director of the Osian’s Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cineman. He has co-edited Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader and Project Cinema City and was editor of the Marg centennial issue on Indian cinema. He has written extensively on various aspects of Indian film history in international journals and anthologies as well as on contemporary Indian art. In 2012 he did a collaborative art show, The Rise of the BROWNationals, at Chemould, Mumbai. Currently he is co-editing a volume on non-multiplex film exhibition in India and doing a research project on the cultures of global modernity in Bombay, 1950-1980.
Juneza Niyazi is an architect and holds a Master’s degree in Interaction Design. She has experience creating spatial interactive installations and speculative digital art for international design festivals. Through her illustrations and physical installations, she is constantly questioning ways to push her art against the limits of technology and trigger nuanced algorithms of emotion and history. She is currently collaborating with a typography artist from Russia to explore the possibilities of creating Type in the VR space. Her medium is usually 3d software with an added layer of interactivity. She often collaborates with developers and electronic engineers to create art at the intersection of the analogue and digital world.
Akshaya Narsimhan is a Bengaluru-based architect, artist and educator with a practice that locates itself at the intersection of all or sometimes none. Her work focuses on creating thought-provoking experiences, through participation and exchange. Inspired by themes of identity, ordinary conversation and spatial interaction, she aspires to find familiarity and relevance in plural contexts. With a background in architecture (TVB School of Habitat Studies) and art (Edinburgh College of Art, UK), Akshaya constantly strives to converge both her backgrounds by way of short-lived spatial pieces. She has been involved in residencies in the UK and Indonesia, and is currently working on a maker-centric curriculum at an architecture school in Bengaluru.
WALA is a Delhi-based collective formed in 2009 by Akansha Rastogi, Sujit Mallik and Paribartana Mohanty. Drawing from people who are known by their professions such as kabadiwala, ice-creamwala or paaniwala, the deliberately missing prefix of WALA allows inhabiting multiple forms of belonging, associations and affinities. WALA sees itself as producer of situations, encounters, devices, formats that allow dialogues to occur with or without artists’ presence. WALA has been engaged with performance art and community art projects.
Niroj Satpathy has a lot of his thought process aided by what he experiences while on the job as a night supervisor in the waste management department and is a self proclaimed apprentice of the night. While watching landfill sites in the light of the stars might not be everyone’s idea of a rewarding creative process, for Niroj, it has shaped him into the artist that he is. He considers himself a participant in the larger ‘process’ and is patient with the time a piece takes to shape itself into a work of art. Some of his works have taken as long as 2 years to complete and some works are intended to be lifelong projects. Niroj enjoys this practice of engaging with the long term, as it keeps the art form ever evolving and open ended, and puts him out of control of the changing nature of the work while welcoming multiple interpretations.
Acknowledgements. Archigram, School of Environment and Architecture - Mumbai, Students’ Biennale - Kochi Biennale Foundation, Ankit Bhargave, Srajana Kaikini, Suman Jadugar, Vanita Gupta.
The Public Life of Women: A feminist memory project NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati
Nepal Picture Library (NPL) is a digital photo archive run by photo.circle that strives to create a broad and inclusive visual archive of Nepali social and cultural history. Since its inception in 2011, NPL has collected over 110,000 photographs from various private and organizational sources across Nepal. The archive serves as an open repository for materials that can secure a multicultural and pluralist representation of Nepali history. It also functions as a medium for active public engagement through which Nepali people can deepen meaningful connections with the past. As part of its objective to create a visually dense version of Nepali history for and with public audiences, NPL has created a network of professionals with interest or specialized knowledge in museum design, preservation, curation, exhibition, graphic design, oral history, writing, education, ethnography, visual culture, media, art history, photography, and publishing.
Acknowledgements. The first phase of research has been made possible by a grant from the Magnum Foundation.
LOAFING ART Nayomi Apsara
Aruna Vidana Arachchi studied visual art and craft at the Visual and Performing Arts University in Colombo and engages in sculpture, 3D art forms, and drawing. He currently conducts lectures and instructs human figure modeling and other types of model making at the university. He has exhibited at the National Art Gallery, at a travelling exhibition in Europe entitled ‘Artful Resistance’, and had a solo show at the Theertha Red Dot Gallery in 2009. The works from the solo, ‘Art of Aruna Vidana Arachchi’ are now in several distinguished collections in Sri Lanka. Along with Pala Pothupitiye, Lalith Manage and other artists Aruna started an art school without fees for teenage school children at the Mullegama Art Center. Aruna is a visual art teacher in a government school and believes in teaching art beyond the conventional school syllabus. He lives in Athurugiriya and works at the Mullegama Art Center.
Bandu Manamperi holds a BFA in sculpture and is a core member of Colombo’s Theertha Artists’ Collective. One of the initiators of performance art in Sri Lanka, Bandu remains one of the leading performance artists active at present. He creates highly personal art experiences based on the transformation of his own body. His art practice also encompasses sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation art. He lectures and consults widely on a range of topics including contemporary art, performance, museology, and local craft traditions in institutions as well as in community service projects.
Pradeep Chandrasiri is a well-known Sri Lankan artist who has exhibited locally and internationally. He is a visiting lecturer on theatre set design and production design at various universities and theatre schools in Colombo. He has designed award-winning theatre sets for the National Theatre Festival of Sri Lanka. He also received the Commonwealth Art and Craft Award for his work in the visual arts in 2003, which allowed him to participate in a visiting artist programme at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He has participated in many local and international artist programmes since 1998, including the second Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial, at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan in 2002. Pradeep was also an instructor of the ‘Ape Gama’ project.
Chamara Guruge is a state award winning playwright and involved in conducting personality development programmes with a theatrical approach for youthful offenders at the young offenders rehabilitation center at Sri Lanka prison at Wataraka, affiliating with the Centre for the Study of Human Rights of University of Colombo as a Counselor. His attempts are to assist victims of law and society aged between thirteen to eighteen, in overcoming their guilt by developing their talents, skills and other capacities of art.
Acknowledgements. Kaushalya Kumarasinghe, Dr. Godwin Constantine, Pala Pothupitiye, Inoka herath, Prof. Jagath Weerasingh, Janith KariyawasamPala Pothupitiye, Roshain Vaidyakularatne
THE UNSPOKEN WORD Rahul Gudipudi
Abdullah Al Othman is an artist and poet. His work is conceptual, and often incorporates the written word, personal manifestos, and tones to suggest various possibilities and meanings. His poetry is published in two volumes, “A Late Memory, 10 seconds” and “This Void May Occur Twice.” In his work, Abdullah searches for that which is fleeting within life, in order “to tighten the fist around that moment and preserve it for eternity.” This artistic vision often sides with the marginal places of life and identities with human dilemmas and struggles. To Duchamp’s “my art is that of living” Abdullah responds with : “Art means living deeply.”
Diya Naidu is a Bangalore based performer and choreographer. Before becoming independent in 2014 she worked and trained with companies like The Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, Rythmosaic and Danceworx for 14 years. Her solos and ensemble pieces investigate gender, ageing, loss of identity, touch and intimacy and are often mixed-media. She has danced and choreographed in commercials, Indian film and The Company Theatre’s production Khwaab Sa - A Midsummer night’s dream. She recently worked on a virtual and an augmented reality film
Léuli Eshrāghi is an artist, curator, writer from the Sāmoan archipelago, Pārs plateau, Guangdong delta and other ancestries. Léuli is the inaugural Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Initiative for Indigenous Futures at Concordia University and makes performances, installations, writing and curatorial projects centred on embodied knowledges, ceremonial-political practices, language renewal and Indigenous futures throughout the Great Ocean. Recent residencies include Dhaka Art Summit, Para Site Hong Kong, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Asia Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts, University of British Columbia – Okanagan, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and Tautai Trust.
Manu Ananth’s art is a reflection of his own inner struggles, the torment a hypersensitive individual experiences in an increasingly desensitised world. Profoundly inspired by the transformative power of Nature, his works are dream visions of the sacred interconnectedness that we are all a part of. His works explore the twilight zone, where one straddles the line between darkness and light, “caught in the labyrinth between the Demon and the Divine” as he reveals in his poetry.
Acknowledgements. Arundhati Ghosh, Dana Awartani, G R Prasad, Lara Baladi, Nandini Sundar
Somewhere in Between Sania Galundia
Ayushman Mitra, born in Kolkata, is a multi-disciplinary artist who primarily works with mixed media on canvas. Having exhibited in Kolkata, Mumbai and London in various shows, he went on to launch his fashion house ‘Bobo Calcutta’ which is the extension of his art into apparel. He believes in making art available to people in the form of bespoke costumes. His art transcends into fashion through bold colors and abstract forms which explode in chaotic symphony. Themes of sexuality and gender form the core of most of his works. He works extensively with craftsmen from India who develop lavish hand embroidery patterns that adorn his canvases and garments. Mitra has been in the field for a decade and continues to be a part of various exhibitions, fashion weeks and collaborations across the world.
Desmond Lazaro was born in Leeds, U.K., and is a painter presently based in Pondicherry. After coming to India to pursue his MFA at the MSU Baroda, Lazaro became captivated with the historic painting traditions of Rajasthan and began a life long journey of preserving them. He mastered miniature painting techniques by studying for twelve years under Jaipur Master Banu Ved Pal Sharma. Lazaro also submitted a PhD thesis on the Pichvai painting tradition at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London. Lazaro’s work, as well as his personal history, spans East and West, and he has exhibited extensively in India, the UK, and Germany. Given the artist’s global history, it is fitting that the most ambitious work in Lazaro’s oeuvre is at the new Mumbai airport, an 80 x 50 foot artwork representing the gods and goddesses of South India using traditional woodcarving and re-imagining of the Tagore painting tradition. Airports are part of “the way home,” and Lazaro has been increasingly interested in house and home as part of a wider concern with identity and belonging. The artist elaborates that “sometimes I don’t know how to get home, so I constantly define and redefine it within myself. It’s the typical East-West dichotomy that has informed and continues to inform my work – often summed up with a simple object like a garden shed, a shack.”
Trisha Bose is an independent illustrator and digital artist based in New Delhi. Post her glorious affair with English honors, she did a corporate stint with an ecommerce company. This opened her eyes to the horrors that awaited her if she were to deliberately disregard her dreams, and so she picked up a paintbrush after five barren years sans art. Thus began a brand new career, and a brutal, yet wholesome struggle to catch up to the person she should have already been. Fast-forward to now, Trisha paints to feed herself and her dogs. She likes aforementioned dogs, psychological thrillers, and food. She entertains herself in activities like constantly making excuses to eat, and creating self-indulgent fan art. Her wanderlust and wallet are constantly at war. She enjoys warm quilts and hot tea.
Acknowledgements. Shireen Gandhy, Urvi Shah, Aparna Andhare, Aashita Galundia
Sediments: Resisting Anonymity Sharareh Bajracharya
Sunita Maharjan is a visual artist and art educator from Kirtipur, Kathmandu. She is fascinated by how humans create spaces according to their environment and needs. She moves fluidly among different mediums - painting, installation art, printmaking, weaving, and sewing. The work being exhibited is part of a new body of works for her second solo exhibition entitled “Shared Skies” opening on 2 December, 2018 at the Siddhartha Art Gallery in Kathmandu. She recently showed at the “Young Subcontinent” at the Serendipirty Art Festival (2017). Maharjan is pursuing her MFA at the Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan. She is a founding member of the nonprofit Srijanalaya that is dedicated to creating safe spaces of learning through the arts and a co-founder of Drawing Room KTM, an artist run studio and learning space.
Lavkant Chaudhary is based in Kathmandu and grew up in Sarlahi in the eastern region of the Terai. He identifies as Kochila Tharu. He explores how Tharus across the Terai have been systematically denied a dignified life and attempts to contextualize the anger that his community feels. In this process he is constantly searching for the medium that would express this historical reality with both depth and subtlety. He works in two dimensional mixed media as well as sculptural forms. Chaudhary is completing his MFA at the Central Department of Fine Arts, TU and will be showing at the Students’ Biennale 2018 that runs parallel to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Chaudhary is a member of Artree Nepal, an artist collective in Kathmandu and also practices as an individual artist.
Mekh Limbu is a Kathmandu based artist who grew up in Dhankuta, in the eastern region of Nepal. He reveals the contemporary culture of Nepal, misdeeds of political figures and systematic suppression of the indigenous identity through his artworks. He believes his work is a medium which connections the the earlier and next generation. Limbu explores different medium through his works moving fluidly among pop art, photo montage, animation, video, and painting. “How I Forget My Mother Tongue, 2018” is his newest works where he uses texts, drawings and photographs from historical archives, educational materials and the Limbu Dictionary. He received his MFA from the Central Department of Fine Arts, Tribhuvan University. He has taught at the Lalitkala Fine Art Campus for 5 years. Limbu has been practicing both as an individual as well as in an artist collective, as a member of Artree. He has exhibited at various galleries and museums in Kathmandu, London, Philadelphia, and Goa.
Subas Tamang enjoys carving, engraving and different forms of printmaking. He belongs to the indigenous Tamsaling community, much of whose history is based on oral narrative traditions that are not well-documented. He seeks to document the cultural and social history of his and other indigenous communities. Tamang is currently completing his MFA at the Central Department of Fine Arts at Tribhuvan University. He is a member of Artree Nepal, an artist collective. This year, he is exhibiting at the Students’ Biennale 2018 running parallel to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. He recently completed a monumental sculpture for the Srihatta Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park commissioned by the Samdhani Foundation (2017).
Sanjeev Maharjan is inspired by Kathmandu, its social surroundings, and the stories people have lived and created. He was born and raised in a family of Newar farmers in Kathmandu and has experienced the city changing from a valley of farmlands to a sprawl of concrete buildings. He explores notions of identity, histories, memory and nostalgia around his family’s and community’s relationship with the land. He represents these through drawings, paintings, photography, installation and murals. Maharjan has exhibited in Nepal, Belgium, and Denmark. He is a second author of the publication Breaking Views, Engaging Art in Post-‐Earthquake Nepal with the visual anthropologist Christiane Brosius published by Himal Books for the Social Science Baha. Maharjan is a founding member of the nonprofit Srijanalaya that is dedicated to creating safe spaces of learning through the arts and a co-founder of Drawing Room KTM, an artist run studio and learning space.
Sheelasha Rajbhandari is a visual artist based in Kathmandu. Her mixed media installations depicts the parallel - yet, often contradictory - existence of traditional beliefs and historic ideas with contemporary events and evolving lifestyles. She is interested in exploring alternate histories like folktales, folklore, legends, oral histories, mythologies etc along with reference of mainstream history. Her recent works explore how Nepal is transforming from once being an important centre for trans-Himalayan trade, and expressing power struggles through a gender perspective. Rajbhandari is careful about choosing materials and methods that align with her conceptual framework. Rajbhandari completed her MFA from Tribhuvan University’s Central Department of Fine Arts 2014 and has exhibited in Dhaka, Hong Kong, Yangon, Warsaw, Goa, Denmark, South Korea, among other places. Rajbhandari is a cofounder of the artist collective, Artree Nepal, which was established in 2013.
Acknowledgments. Kumudini Gurung, Ben Ayers, Gyanu Adhikari, Ishita Shahi, Sangeeta Thapa, Sujan Chitrakar, Pooja Sood and Veerangana Solanki.
Past Doesn’t Have Any Vanishing Point Shimul Saha
Acknowledgments. Deepak Ruhil, Deepti Babbar, Mahbubur Rahman, Rajender Singh, Rajnish Chhanesh, Tanzim Wahab andTayeba Begum Lipi
So You think you know the Closet? Sumitra
The Archives:
QAMRA (Queer Archive for Memory Reflection and Activism) as the name suggests, is a gender and sexual minorities archive in India. It is a physical archive, located in the southern city of Bangalore. The idea for this archive is the brainchild of T Jayashree, an independent filmmaker who has been documenting the LGBTQ+ movement on video in India. QAMRA intends to be a ‘living’ archive – not just to recreate nostalgia but giving meaning to this nostalgia, grief and memory into something present and active. The material in QAMRA is about the public history of the movement, but the focus is also on private lives of individuals, of which there is very little existing documentation.
Orinam, founded in 2003, is an all-volunteer unregistered collective of LGBTIQA+ people and allies based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. It functions as a support, cultural and activist space. The website lists helplines and also features a blog. Orinam also hosts a comprehensive timeline of the legal struggle to repeal section 377 along with its archive of opinions from the community. Varta
Varta is an older collective based in Koltaka that also had one of the first magazines on gender and sexuality issues (Pravartak magazine - 1991-2000 and Counsel Club - 1993-2000). They have modelled themselves as a resource centre as well as a Webzine that features articles and stories from and of the community.
Acknowledgements. Neelima P Aryan, T Jayashree
ilâj Yasaman Tamizkar
Hamed Jaberha has been working as a graphic designer for 17 years. He is the director of Studio “HEH” in Tehran. He has been a program coordinator in Rybon art center in Iran — Rybon is an international institute that was established in 2008 in the field of contemporary critical art. He is also a visual artist and works in art photography, video art and installation. In recent years he has created installations in series that are largely based on or influenced by photos. His works represent a close connection between image, imagination, history, politics, philosophy, and society. As a multidisciplinary artist, he has a critical viewpoint about his surroundings. As a Middle Eastern citizen, he is inspired by his daily personal experiences. He has held 3 solo exhibitions in Iran and participated in many photography, video art and interdisciplinary art group exhibitions in Iran, Poland, Japan, England, Czech Republic, Germany, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and Bangladesh.
Sara Ghods started her artistic experiments from an early age. Attending art school was the beginning of her professional practice. After completing her BA in Painting at Tehran University of Art, she started experimenting with new materials and techniques. She works predominantly in the medium of installation and new media. While exploring silkscreen printing, illustration, ceramics and glaze, jewelry making and sculpture, she also focused on different fields of study such as iconography, mythology, semiotics, nature, human behavior and anatomy, and social and cultural studies She then went on to continue her MA in illustration at the University of Tehran. Dark humor, rituals, different societies and their reactions towards the future of the world continue to fascinate her.
Sadra Wejdani is currently based in Tehran. He studied Art & Cross Media Design in the Netherlands and completed his master’s in Communication design (social design) in Brussels. As a multi-output artist he tries to respond to his surroundings through various media on social environmental matters. At the same time urban issues inspire him to work on social design projects as an art director/communication designer. His last solo ceramics exhibtion was in 2017 about consuming products. He also took part in several group exhibitions. The most recent exhibition was in 2018, a collaborative photo installation with the artist Borhan Ebnoddin on the closed and distorted perspective of urban life today. As a communication designer he also cooperates with urban NGOs and collectives on the matter of public spaces. He has also founded a collective that deals with human scale urbanism and transportation.
Acknowledgments. Farhad Khalesi Moghaddam, Farnaz Ghorbani, Gargi Raina, Goethe-Institut (Iran), Mahsa Ranjbarian, Morad Montazami, Tooraj Khamenehzadeh, Volker Redder