CISA 2023 Fellowship

Curator: Bishal Yonjan

The exhibition was part of ongoing research into the intersection of technical acumen and artistic labor that shapes book cover design and printed matter. Connecting dots to line, scaling, graphing, and situating an archive-in-making to understand the vocabulary of Tek Bir Mukhiya, who defined the visual contours of many of Nepal’s seminal 20th century modern literary works.

Bishal Yonjan (Nepal) is a visual artist based out of Kathmandu. He is a part of Kalā Kulo, an arts initiative, where he works on a series of archives contextualizing the contributions of artists who have been central to introducing novel artistic vocabularies to Nepal in the 20th century. His current interest includes exploring the regional histories of printed matter and book design in South Asia. He is also a member of Aṅkūra Atelier, a creative collective.

Curator: Umair Badheeu
Participating Artists: Anastasiia Yakymenko and Kostek Strzelski, Mohamed Ikram, Ahmed Amir

Edition 1. A collection of works created in response to Bernard Koechlin’s life, work, and archive. Bernard Koechlin was a French mariner and ethnographer (1928-2007), who coined the term “ethnogestics,” which envisions a shared gestural language among the people of the Indian Ocean. Living amongst the Maldivians, Koechelin documented a distinct seafaring culture. His archive offers glimpses into the situations he engaged in, interpreting and responding to the environment, sounds, gestures, gazes, expressions, postures, and attire. Umair Badheeu’s exploration of Koechelin’s archive took shape through a collaboration with three artists and an anthropologist.

Umair Badheeu (Maldives) is an artist, curator, and freediver. His two-decade long career in the arts saw him involved in a range of disciplines from painting + photography to curating and conservation.

Curator: Sukanya Deb
Participating Artists: Akshay Sethi, Joe Paul Cyriac, Nihaal Faizal, Suvani Suri, Vshpag (Vrinda Singh), Zishaan A Latif

We have extended human vision to the point of being able to see the whole of our world all at once. With the development of imaging technology, our eyes have left our bodies and lie within the lens of the camera, the satellite, the closed-circuit television. We see the image before we see the world. At the centre of this exhibitory proposition is the idea of the ‘claim’ and the slippages between abstracted and projected reality.

Sukanya Deb (India) is a writer and curator, whose interest lies in the intersections of contemporary art, culture, technology, and their material propositions, inhabited through exhibitory, digital and print formats. She has worked extensively in programs and curation within the arts sector, which has broadened her interest in generating and experimenting with existing infrastructures for support, collaborative exchange, and dissemination.

Curator: Jatin Gulati
Participating Artists: Sofia Karim (Liverpool / London), Bani Abidi (Karachi / Berlin), Bharath Murthy (Bengaluru), Rajat Dey (Kolkata), Joe Paul Cyriac (Trivandrum)

What shapes distance? In what forms are things kept apart? With the earth and sky being increasingly fragmented, claimed, capitalised and reproduced, we find ourselves existing between many versions of the same world. We meet worlds of disillusionment—a dawn abruptly separated from the night, and one of hope—of the dawn that still awaits.

Jatin Gulati (India) is a writer, visual artist, and educator with a formal education in architecture. His writings and photographic works are informed by various aspects of ‘absences’, though most often driven by its traces in the immediate, personal, and lived experiences. His interest in thinking photography stems from the role of images as mythmaking for socio-political and familial ideologies.

Curator: Jaisingh Nageswaran
Participating Artists: Arun Vijay Madhavan, Chandru Gurusamy, Kritika Sriram, Osheen Siva, Palani Kumar, Saran Raj

This exhibition follows the legacy of artist Chandru, and features work by emerging artists from the Dalit community in Tamil Nadu. Kritika Sriram examines her relationship with her mother through resonances in Bama’s Karuku. Arun Vijay Madhavan takes us through a day in the life of a mortuary worker. Palani’s work carries the images of the working-class people’s footwear. Saran Raj’s sculptural piece depicts the entanglements of honor killings in the state. Osheen imagines new worlds of decolonized dreamscapes, futuristic oasis with mutants and monsters and narratives of queer and feminine power.

Jaisingh Nageswaran (India) is a self-taught photographer from Vadipatti village, Tamil Nadu, India. Born to working-class parents, he was educated by his grandmother at home. Jaisingh’s work revolves around showing the lives of socially marginalised communities, exploring themes of gender identity, caste discrimination, and issues of rural life.

Curator: Atefeh Khas
Participating Artists: Mehdi Sadr, Amin Shojaei, Sahar Mokhtari, Minoosh Zomorodinia, Sepideh Abtahi, Payam Rafiee

Halal is an Arabic word that simply means lawful or permitted food.
Halāhala is the name of a type of poison in Hindu mythology.

Atefeh Khas (Iran) is an environmental artist, curator and art director lives in Tehran, Iran. She employs video, photography, sculpture, and performance in her site-specific installations to address environmental and social issues. She received her MA in Art Research from Alzahra University, 2014, and BFA in Painting from Shahed University in Tehran, in 2010.

Curator: Neda Haffari
Participating Artists: Fabienne Francotte, Jupiter Pradhan, Pratima Thakali

Neda Haffari was diagnosed with Stage 4 stomach cancer in August 2022. Survival was no easy feat. In an effort to shed light on the process, to offer her insights and support to others in similar circumstances, she made the decision to initiate a series of healing-focused exhibitions. This exhibition features the works of exceptional artists, each contributing their unique perspective on the theme of healing. Among them is Prakash Ranjit, a talented Nepali visual artist and illustrator, whose pieces document his own self-healing journey, two Nepali multidisciplinary artists, Jupiter Pradhan and Salil Subedi, whose video installation reflects Jupiter’s personal struggles while a beloved family member underwent treatment for a critical illness, Pratima Takali also from Nepal, with an installation underscoring the pivotal role of one’s home as an intimate space in the healing journey.

Neda Haffari (Iran) is a short story writer from Iran, residing in Kathmandu, Nepal since 2013. She was born in 1983 and holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering. Haffari is currently serving as the Director of Space A, an interdisciplinary art practice in Nepal, while also pursuing a master’s degree in curatorial studies at Kathmandu University Department of Art and Design.

Curator: Pramodha Weerasekera
Participating Artists: Sabeen Omar, Arshad Hakim, Aruni Dharmakirthi

inordinate skies invited you to be moved. Starting from the curator’s own personal desire to look at the sky in moments of despair, melancholy, and pondering, the artworks in this project mark sometimes significant, sometimes fleeting yet memorable skies. The three artists’ relationships with such skies were metaphorical and intricately detailed––they reflect on the emotional impact of the presence(s) and absence(s) of skies amidst their individual urban, busy lives in the cities of Colombo, Bangalore, and Brooklyn (with the project being primarily produced in Delhi). inordinate skies had three curatorial ‘interventions’: an exhibition; a publication with a curatorial essay, commissioned piece by each artist, and more skies, a series of public programmes.

Pramodha Weerasekera (Sri Lanka) is a curator, researcher, and writer based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She holds a BA (Hons) in English (University of Colombo) and an LLB (Hons) (University of London). She has been the Assistant Curator Education and Public Programmes at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka since its inception in 2019.

Curator: Bunu Dhungana
Participating Artists: Asmita Badim Shradha Devkota, Irina Giri, Ujjwala Maharjan, Tripty Pakhrin, Ayushma Regmi, Shristi Shrestha, Prateebha Tuladhar

Eight artists respond to the prompt ‘mother.’ The starting point was the sensation of having something in your belly—a feeling in the gut, stomach-churning, expanding and contracting, inhaling and exhaling. Sometimes, in between stillness and unyielding storm. And sometimes in a mundane, regular way. Bunu felt limited in her inquiry into how patriarchies shaped her relationship with her mother and she was curious how other people would interpret this word. Over three months, the artists delved into processes rooted in their personal experiences around mothers.

Bunu Dhungana (Nepal) is an artist based out of Kathmandu, Nepal. She uses photography and film to explore and question the world around her. Her background in Sociology informs her work. She is interested in questioning notions of gender and patriarchy through her practice. Her process is intuitive.