Sujit Mallik

About the Actant

Sujit Kumar Mallik is a multi-media artist exploring communicative practices in art positioned at intersections of performance and participation. He is the founder of Saagwala, a Delhi (NCR) based ecological collective founded in 2017 with Pawan Dubey and Neeraj Pandey. The project is the apotheosis of his practice from 2012, an ongoing dialogue with post-human earth - from the material and performative responses to soil, to complex social and political fabric of modern urban living. Sujit is from Bagudi village on the foothills of Eastern Ghat mountain range of Soro, Balasore, Odisha, India, and completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking from B.K College of Arts & Crafts, Odisha (2005). His art works and performances explore themes like losing horizons, waste generation, infections, citizenship, social structures and ecology. He is the recipient of a number of awards and residencies including INLAKS Fine Art Award (2011), and FICA Public Art Grant (2012). And has performed and exhibited at Seoul Architecture Biennale (2017), and in Zurich, Basel, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and Odisha. His collective WALA formed in 2009 with Akansha Rastogi and Paribartana Mohanty is a producer of situations, encounters and formats that allows new critical dialogue to occur with or without the artist’s presence.

Through a series of interconnected performances conducted at Goethe-Institut / Max Muller Bhavan New Delhi and the artists farm (Saagwala) at Jawli village, Ghaziabad, Sujit have everyday conversations on ecology, land art, trees, eating habits, food safety and possibilities in ecological living. Sujit sees human participants and non-human beings (such as trees and vegetables) as actants and collaborators of this incident, to trigger a small fracture in our current urban centric living and humanist condition - where man has been alienated from other species on this earth.