Musician, designer and co-founder of Dak Ti Crafts, Rida Gatphoh, lens-based artist, scholar and writer Sharbendu De, artist and co-founder of Anga Art Collective, Dharmendra Prasad, reflect on the impact of art on the environment and how we can pave the way for a more sustainable art world in a conversation moderated by Nobina Gupta, Founder-Director of Disappearing Dialogues Collective.
Sharbendu De: Sharbendu De (b. 1978) is a contemporary lens-based artist, academic and a writer. His photographic mise-en-scènes have often been called ‘cinematic stills’. He is the 2022 Visiting Artist Fellow at Harvard University. A recipient of multiple grants from the MurthyNAYAK Foundation, KHOJ, Prince Claus Fund & ASEF, Lucie Foundation and India Foundation for the Arts, De has exhibited across the Harvard University (2022), Guangdong Times Museum (2022), Rencontres d’Arles, Arles (2022), Asian Art Biennale, Taiwan (2021), Photoville (2022), Shrine Empire Gallery, New Delhi (2021-22), India Art Fair, New Delhi (2022), Goethe-Institut, Mumbai (2022), Vadehra Art Gallery (2020-21), PhEST, Italy (2020), FORMAT, U.K. (2019), Serendipity Arts Festival (2019) among others. His artworks are part of several private collections.
Rida Gatphoh: Rida Gatphoh (b. 1980) is a social entrepreneur, designer and a singer-songwriter. She is the founder of the Shillong based social enterprise Dak_ti Craft and the art collective The Musical Folks. She is an alumna of NIFT where she has also taught as an assistant professor. She aims to conserve nature and preserve traditional arts & crafts from Meghalaya through various design intervention and livelihood programs. She is the recipient of the Sparrow Award 2016, National Entrepreneurship Award 2019, Pupul Jayakar Craft Design Award 2021 and Northeast Young Heroes Award 2022. Few of her current projects include curation for Meghalayan Age – The Store in New Delhi, organising Winter Tales Shillong – an artisanal green festival and empaneled training partner with MSSDS.
Dharmendra Prasad: Rolling through orality, toil, winds, dimensions, horizon and deteriorating seasons and sites,Dharmendra Prasad harvests imagination, memories, times, change and toil, that are stored as residue in the backyard of life’s goal.
Through the medium of need, time, toil and soil Dharmendra’s practice gets cultivated and tilled-up in the form of installations, videos, paintings, photography, texts, events, and travelogue and beyond.Born in-between stories, discrimination, hierarchies, chaos and silence, full of winds and dusts,without any address, Dharmendra practices between the fields of Gangetic plains to the villages, water bodies and rainforests of northeast India, and in extension co-founding the Guwahati based Anga Art Collective.
Nobina Gupta: Nobina Gupta: Nobina Gupta, a visual artist and researcher deals with the relationships between socio-spatial realities, climate emergencies and behavioural changes. Her focus on creative ecology gave her the impetus to initiate and curate the Disappearing Dialogues Collective that strives in collaboration with various practitioners, youth from communities and organisations towards conservation and sustainability of the East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW).
As a recipient of Prakriti Research Fellowship 2022 and IFA – Pari Museum and Archive grant 2021 she has been instrumental in empowering the community children to research, document and preserve wetlands biodiversity, grounded learning’s and community stories from disappearing.
Titled ‘Align & Disrupt’, the talks programme curated by independent curator and educator Shaleen Wadhwana, and supported by Shiv Nadar – Institution Of Eminence, aims to align voices of leading artists and arts professionals on critical issues in the arts ecosystem, and collectively disrupt the status quo to shape a more aware and inclusive art world of the future. For the first time, the key learnings and insights from these talks will be documented in an action-plan which will be widely circulated and made accessible to the public on the India Art Fair website. All talks will be conducted in Indian Sign Language.