Artists

bangaloREsident-Expanded@Teufelsberg

As a muralist, Anpu Varkey has been creating large-scale public art across India and internationally for over a decade. Her journey began with the Extension Khirkee project, and she has since played a vital role in organizing street festivals in Delhi and Mumbai.

She curated two significant projects for the Kochi Muziris Biennale in 2012 and 2014. Her latest work can be found at the Guru Dronacharya metro station in Gurgaon, spanning 24,000 sq ft.

During her Residency at Teufelsberg, Berlin, she is interested in looking at it historically and its change from a cold-war era espionage centre to a unique open art gallery, through conversations with people.

bangaloREsident-Expanded@ZKM | Hertzlab 

George Panicker is a new media artist, creative technologist, and computational designer based in Bangalore. His practice moves fluidly across disciplines—working with code, sound, visuals, and complex systems to explore the messy intersections of media technology, ecology, and society in a period of liquid modernity. His work often engages with community infrastructure, indigenous knowledge systems, subaltern feminism, and ecological thought and he’s especially interested in how networks—social, digital, biological—can be re-imagined through collaborative design and collaborative critical making for building actual viable futures for the planet at large.

At ZKM, George seeks to research how immersive sound and computational music can act as potential harbingers of change, both in a personal as well as real medical sense.

bangaloREsident-Expanded@Lichtenberg Studios

Nitya Misra uses the medium of narrative film to examine incidental, and supposedly insignificant moments, as a way to uncover the extraordinary aspects of everyday life in urban spaces. She weaves together video, writing, memory, music, and digital media to bring stories to life.

Nitya’s work spans different film formats, including advertisement films, feature-length fiction, short fiction, music videos, and short documentary.

During her residency at Lichtenberg Studios, Berlin Nitya is interested in discovering a place through its lost objects. What do lost objects tell us about a place? What do they tell us about the people who inhabit a space?

bangaloREsident-Expanded@Zentralwerk

Payal Rajput is a visual artist, ceramicist, and art educator based in Bangalore. She completed her BVA in Painting, 2018 and MVA in Mural, 2021 from Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda, India. Her practice is invested in engaging with and re-imagining objects, places, and spaces as a way to re-live or trigger memories. A major source of her inspiration has been her ancestral home in Shahbazpur, Uttar Pradesh.

While at Zentralwerk, Dresden, Payal will work on the collection of objects specifically from the Museum of Ethnology, not only in terms of their histories and contexts, but also as museumised objects removed from where they belong.

bangaloREsident-Expanded@basis e.V.

Renuka Rajiv has had an interest in making things since childhood, exploring drawing, paper-mache, tie-dye and stitching. They studied short-film production at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (with Honours) majoring in printmaking at Victorian College of Art, Melbourne. Since then, their work has reconnected with the childhood interests of playing with fabric and paper. Most themes and content in their work is personal, which includes the compulsion towards the hand-made. Their work inhabits a space that accommodates the imaginative, observational and autobiographical.

Since 2012 they have been exhibiting regularly in group and solo shows. Their work has been exhibited recently at Chitrakala Parishad (Bangalore), ShrineEmpire (Delhi), FICA (Delhi), Vancouver Queer Arts Festival (Canada), Silvia’s Mother (UK) and Museum of Art and Photography (Bangalore). Prizes include FICA Emerging Artist Award, Substation exhibition prize and City of Stonington Print Prize. They have been on art residencies at CONA (Bombay), T.A.J. (Bangalore), Pro Helvetia + FICA (Switzerland) and Halden Bookworks (Norway).  

At the residency at basis e.V. Frankfurt, their primary goal would be to learn and work with the medium of riso-printing to create artist books and installations. Access to the process remains unavailable in India, and an extended stay abroad is my sole chance to learn and work with it.

They plan to make one editioned book, a number of artist books and an ongoing installation—all using riso as their primary medium. Renuka would like to use a series of recent drawings as a starting point for the work that they will make at the residency. They want to manipulate the figure-ground relationships of these line drawings through colour and texture to arrive at varied outcomes. So far, formally, most of the books they have made have been either stitch-bound or accordion fold. Across the three months, they want to explore forms that are more sculptural.  Additionally, central to their practice would be to connect with fellow artists, independent publishers and artistic print workshop spaces.

bangaloREsident-Expanded@C. Rockefeller Center for Contemporary Arts

Seljuk Rustum, originally from Kannur, Kerala, is a Kochi-based contemporary arts practitioner. His work spans painting, music, curation, production, and sound engineering, embodying a postmodern approach that dissolves boundaries between media. He is the founder and Creative Director of Forplay Society, an interdisciplinary performance space dedicated to experimental and independent art forms, in Kochi. As a musician and sound artist, Seljuk plays alto saxophone, guitar, percussion, and synthesizer, engaging in free improvisation and experimental compositions. 

During his residency at C.Rockefeller Center, Dresden Seljuk intends to integrate elements of sound art, media art, and technology-driven performance, often incorporating soldering, circuit bending, and custom-built sound tools. He would also continue his ongoing projects and collaborations with friends and colleagues in Germany. 

bangaloREsident-Expanded@Schauburg

Shashank Rajashekar is a theatre practitioner and educator from Bangalore. He has been an active part of the city’s theatre scene for the last 5 years during which he has donned various roles such as Actor, Writer, Lyricist, Teacher, Set Designer and Festival Manager to name a few. He was selected for Indianostrum Theatre Mentorship Programme in 2021, following which he has attended various workshops facilitated by well-known theatre practitioners in India. Having worked under directors like Sharanya Ramprakash, Surabhi Vasisht, Revanth Malige, B Jayashree and Siddhant Sundar, he has also been teaching theatre to children for over a year now.

Having been part of theatre plays for the young audiences and co-facilitating workshops for children under the guidance of Surabhi Vasisht, he will be immersing himself in exploring storytelling techniques, performances, and rehearsals at Schauburg. He wishes to learn and develop engaging, interactive methods to encourage interaction, participation, imagination and creativity of young minds. He will enhance these experiences to tell stories and also create a curriculum for enhancing children’s learning and theatre exposure.

bangaloREsident@ Weltkunstzimmer

Shilpa Nayudu is a visual artist who works with various mediums. She finds inspiration in the human body, nature and spaces around her. Shilpa’s recent works are imbued with a deep sense of admiration and gratitude towards the human body and mind, reflecting her unique blend of artistic inquiry, medical knowledge, and her reverence for the subject she portrays.

Fabric and embroidery serve as extensions of the body - mediums that hold personal and cultural histories. She is eager to expand her work by integrating German, Romanian and Georgian cultural embroidery and textile, alongside her own Indian embroidery traditions. Furthermore, she is keen on experimenting with sound and movement which would convert body sounds like heartbeats, breathing patterns, and digestive sounds into immersive auditory soundscapes.
At Weltkunstzimmer, she aims to develop a body of work that makes the hidden internal landscapes of the body perceptible.
 

bangaloREsident-Expanded@Experimental Radio

Vineesh Amin is a new media artist and designer whose work exists at the intersection of art, design, and technology. He creates custom audio synthesizers and immersive sound experiences that invite audiences to explore new dimensions of perception.

With a background in sculpture and a master’s degree in New Media Design from the National Institute of Design, Gandhinagar, Vineesh’s practice merges material exploration with technological experimentation. Inspired by the observer effect, Vineesh investigates how time, space, and audience interaction coalesce to create dynamic, evolving experiences.

His recent projects include Now, an interactive installation examining the relationship between time and the human body, and Echo 2.0, exhibited at Studio Im Hachhaus (Berlin) and Kunstraum München (Munich), which explored responsive environments through sound and movement.

Vineesh is also part of Cynk Collective, which creates immersive audio-visual performances combining technology and live interaction. His projects with Cynk include Sonicular at the 15th India Art Fair and Wetspace Noise Drips 3.0 at Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi.

During his residency at Experimental Radio in Munich, Vineesh will explore sonic sculptures: interactive sound-based installations that encourage and evolve with audience presence and engagement. Through his work, he aims to blur the boundaries between the listener and the sound, enabling the audience to become co-creators of the experience. By fostering collaboration between the performer and the audience, he seeks to enhance the sense of interconnectedness and discover new possibilities for shared sonic experiences.