There has been an exponential growth of artist publications in the past decade that foreground new modalities of dissemination, sustainability and image-making. This panel looks at the different aesthetic, material and ideological choices underpinning such practices. Representatives from BlueJackal, Offset Projects, Reliable Copy and Restricted Fixations will participate in the panel, which will be moderated by Annalisa Mansukhani.
The session will take place from 7:35pm – 8:45pm (New Delhi/Colombo) | 7:50pm – 9:00pm (Kathmandu) | 7:05pm – 8:15pm (Islamabad) | 8:05pm – 9:15pm (Dhaka). To register and join, click here.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Annalisa Mansukhani is a writer, researcher and curator studying histories of photography and notions of the archive in contemporary art and curatorial practices. She has previously worked at the Kochi Biennale Foundation, and is one of the recipients of the first Critical Collective – PhotoSouthAsia Young Writers Award for lens-based practices. Annalisa is a contributing writer for ASAP | art where she dissects possibilities of the photographic in contemporary inter-media practices. As the Programmes Manager for the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) in Delhi, she establishes frameworks and activates resources around art and education, curating, research, and public programming. Writing alongside image and verse, she is currently fascinated by evolving vocabularies of imaging trauma and violence in art.
BlueJackal is a platform for engaging with, creating and publishing visual narratives, comics, picture books and initiating dialogue and learning within these contexts through interactive programs. It is run by three core members, Shivangi Singh, Shefalee Jain and Lokesh Khodke. BlueJackal was born in 2015 of a desire for and the ever receding possibility of togetherness. The organisation sees coming together with all its temporariness, contradictoriness, conflict as well as possibilities. As writers, artists, researchers, they have often felt compelled by and yet wary of what constitutes the ‘limits’ or the defining borders of their callings, and have realized both the need to draw these strategic boundaries and the will to dissolve them. BlueJackal is a platform for exploring this conundrum in its creative, political and philosophical dimensions.
Offset Projects works to create channels of engagement in photography and book making through artist talks, workshops, residencies, curated reading rooms and collaborative exercises in publishing. The founders believe that story telling lies at the heart of human creative energy and would like to make a space for collective engagement, meaningful critique and reflective inquiry. The initiative runs a photo book library, the Offset Pitara, which has been creating active interventions in looking at the photo book as an artistic form in its own right. The Offset Press has also recently published Guftgu, the first-of-its-kind deconstructed photobook featuring works by contemporary photographers from South Asia. The Offset Bookshop is India’s only photobook store focused on independent and self-published books from South Asia.
Reliable Copy is a publishing house and curatorial practice dedicated to the realisation and circulation of works, projects, and writing by and around artists. Reliable Copy is based in Bangalore, India, and was founded in 2018. It is represented by the artists Nihaal Faizal and Sarasija Subramanian. Sarasija Subramanian who will be speaking on this panel is an artist whose work engages with historical texts, oral histories, and myths, stemming from the want to revisit critical moments from the past, often of great importance during their time, and bring them back into the public eye to examine in our current contexts.
Restricted Fixations is a subscription based zine initiative. Each issue has a different theme, with eight issues in total. This project is primarily for creative practitioners who haven’t made or included work in zine form, and involves 15 – 20 contributors per issue with a broad range of mediums and sensibilities. Restricted Fixations is a response to the overwhelming move online since COVID, to activate something tangible, involving many contributors, collaborations, and work with present constraints using the mediums of zines and post. Renuka from Restricted Fixations, the speaker on the panel has studied digital video production at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore and has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (with Honours) majoring in printmaking at Victorian College of Art, Melbourne. Their work inhabits a space that accommodates the imaginative, observational and autobiographical. Since 2012, they have been exhibiting regularly in group and solo shows and have exhibited at Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi), Nichido Contemporary (Tokyo), Yokohama Trienalle (Yokohama) and Chitrakala Parishat (Bangalore). They have won prestigious awards including the FICA Emerging Artist Award, substation exhibition prize and City of Stonington Print Prize.
ABOUT STAGING THE CONTEMPORARY
‘Staging the Contemporary: The Next Generation’ is a two-day symposium and knowledge platform presented by India Art Fair and Ishara Art Foundation and is supported by Shiv Nadar University. The symposium aims to bring together the next generation of artists, curators, collectives and writers working in South Asia to deliberate on the urgencies, methodologies and infrastructures that lay new foundations for cultural practices today.