Latika Gupta trained in visual culture studies from JNU in Delhi, and has received fellowships from the India Foundation for the Arts and the Nehru Trust for research on Trans-Himalayan art and rituals and was a research fellow at SOAS, London (2017) on a Charles Wallace Trust India Fellowship. She has worked as a curator at the NGMA, Delhi, KHOJ International Artists’ Association and curated exhibitions of South Asian and international contemporary art.
Her research interests focus on the material culture and art history of Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh, with a focus on Indo-Tibetan Buddhist monastic art and rituals, as well as museum studies, particularly the shifting registers of value and meaning-making of ritual and everyday objects. She curated the permanent exhibition for a trade-routes artifacts museum in Kargil, Ladakh.
As associate editor at Marg Publications, she edited the quarterly journal from 2016-2020. She is a part of the editorial collective of the multiformat research and publication project ‘100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object’, teaches courses on the visual and material cultures of the Himalayas as visiting faculty at Ashoka University and works as Director, Projects at the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation in Delhi.
Source: olbios.org
Anand is the publisher of Navayana. He has annotated three of B.R. Ambedkar’s works, including Annihilation of Caste. He is a student of raga music, a poet and a translator. He is presently working on an edition of Kabir’s songs that he sings in the light of the suttas attributed to the Buddha and Ambedkar’s ideas of samanta and manuski.
Amitangshu Acharya is currently a Leverhulme Trust PhD Scholar at the Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh, U.K. His doctoral research – a political ecology of small things – decodes middle class cultural politics which shapes the techno-mediation of urban environments in the majority world.
A political ecologist by training, Amitangshu is a researcher, international development worker, writer, and a freelance journalist. For over a decade, he has worked on water management and conservation projects in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Kenya and Nepal. He has simultaneously contributed ground reports and Op-Eds on environment, culture and society in news outlets such as The Economist, U.K; The Independent, U.K; Khaleej Times, UAE, and The Economic Times, Indian Express, and The Hindu, India. His earlier research on local knowledge-based flood forecasting in Bihar, India was cited and discussed in the IPCC, Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC), in 2019. His long term research interests include postcolonial nature, politics of environmental knowledge, and decolonising sustainability science.
An eminent linguist and social scientist Anvita Abbi has been visiting professor in Universities across Europe, Australia, and the Americas and has taught Linguistics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, India for 38 years. She identified the sixth language family of India which was corroborated by the geneticists. One of the rare linguists, she has carried out first-hand field research on all the six language families of India, extending from the Himalayas to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
An editor and author of 24 books, her work on tribal and other minority languages of South Asia has been exemplary and has bagged several national and international awards including the Bhasha Samman in 2003, Leverhulme Professorship at the University of London in 2011, Padma Shri in 2013 and the Kenneth Hale Award in 2015 by the Linguistic Society of America for “outstanding lifetime contributions to the documentation and description of languages of India”. She was the founder Director of the Centre for Oral and Tribal Literature at Sahitya Akademi New Delhi. An advisor to several national and international institutes including the UNESCO on language issues, she has contributed to the awareness of linguistic diversity of South Asia. Among the latest publications include Voices from the Lost Horizon. Stories and Songs of the Great Andamanese. 2021. Niyogi Books. New Delhi.
Pankaj Sekhsaria is a long time member of the environmental group Kalpavriksh and is currently Associate Professor at the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas (CTARA), IIT Bombay. His research interests lie at the intersection of science, environment, society and technology.
He has written extensively on issues of the environment and wildlife with a special focus on the A&N Islands. His books on the islands include his debut novel The Last Wave (HarperCollins 2014) Islands in Flux (Harper Litmus 2019), which is a collection of 20 years of his journalism about the islands and most recently Waiting for Turtles (Kardi Tales 2021) – an illustrated story book and his first for children on turtle nesting in the Andamans. (also in Hindi and Telugu).
His recent books in the broad field of Sociology of Technology include Instrumental Lives - an intimate biography of an Indian laboratory (Routledge 2019) and Nanoscale - Society's deep impact on science, technology and innovation in India (Authors Upfront, 2020).
He is a keen photographer as well and has three photographic exhibitions to his credit:
- Island Worlds... of land and sea: a photographic exhibition of his A&N pics that were all printed on silk fabric (exhibited in Pune, Chennai, Goa, Hyderabad and Delhi over the period 2016-18)
- Many Yarns of the cotton handloom exhibition: a multi-media exhibition on cotton handlooms of Andhra and Telangana (New Delhi, 2018) and
- The river and the macaque: a photographic exhibition of 'nature in the city' (Hyderabad, 2019)
Dr Ranjan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oslo Metropolitan University (Norway). He is part of the “Riverine Rights” project funded by the Research Council of Norway. He has recently published an edited volume: “At the Crossroads of Rights: Forest Struggles and Human Rights in Postcolonial India”, published by the Routledge Press, London (March 2022). He was awarded the PhD by the University of London in 2020, where he worked for the Human Rights Research Network.
Arunkumar’s sustained artistic investigation into a diversity of ecological concerns brings forth disharmonies, which are created by rampant consumerist culture. This spread is in inverse proportion to the great decline of natural resources and habitats. With each work, Arunkumar brings in his own local, historical and cultural milieu. The work becomes a generative rather than a conclusive commentary of his concerns regarding the environment at large.
His choice of medium (re-used and re-cycled goods), and consequently, the execution of such concern[s] reflects a negotiation between suburban life and a longing to return to his rural roots. The farmer takes on the role of the protagonist and also becomes the subject to assert the integral role s/he plays in the preservation of environmental bio-diversity.
Arunkumar’s solo shows include: CON-struction, Gallery Espace, New Delhi [2018]; In-site, Aicon Gallery, New York [2018]; Seed of Reckoning, Mumbai Art Room [2012]; Tract, Nature Morte, New Delhi [2010]; Feed, Nature Morte in New Delhi and Sakshi Gallery in Mumbai [2006]. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in India and abroad, and particpated in numerous artist residencies. In 2014, he set up the Centre for Knowledge and Environment (www.saracentre.org) in the Western Ghats region of Karnataka, India.
Heather Davis is a writer, researcher, and teacher whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. She is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School. Her book, Plastic Matter (Duke UP, 2022), argues that plastic has transformed ecologies around the world due to its incredible longevity and range, as it has also transformed our understandings and expectations of matter and materiality. She is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. Davis has written widely for art and academic publications on questions of contemporary art, politics, and ecology, and has lectured internationally, including at the MoMA, Columbia, MIT, Sonic Acts Academy, Transmediale, HKW, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Yinchuan Biennale. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015) and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s UP, 2017)
Ruth Padel is an award-winning British poet and conservationist, author of twelve acclaimed poetry collections including We Are All from Somewhere Else, a prose-and-poetry work arguing that migration is a natural part, from cells upwards, of how the world works, and Darwin: A Life in Poems, on her great great grandfather Charles Darwin. Novels include Where the Serpent Lives on Indian wildlife; her non-fiction includes an indepth study of tiger conservation across Asia. She is Professor of Poetry at King’s College, London, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, and Trustee of New Networks for Nature, a UK alliance of scientists, artists and conservationists
Author of four books of poetry, - Two Full Moons (Bombaykala Books), Words Not Spoken (Brown Critique), The Longest Pleasure (Finishing Line Press) and The Silk Of Hunger (AuthorsPress), Vinita is an award winning poet, editor, translator and curator. Joint Recipient of the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 and winner of the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence, USA, 2015. She is Poetry Editor with Usawa Literary Review. Her poem won a prize at the Proverse Poetry Prize 2018 and was published as a part of the winning poems anthology titled Mingled Voices 2.
More recently her poem won a special mention in the Hawker Prize for best South Asian poetry. Her poems have been published in the Mascara Review, Punch magazine, Tiger Moth Review, India Quarterly, Teesta journal, Bombay Review among others. Three of her poems find place in the Best Asian Poetry 2021 published by Kitab. She has contributed a monthly column on Asian Poets on the literary blog of the Hamline university, Saint Paul, USA in 2016-17.
In September 2020, she edited an anthology on climate change titled Open Your Eyes (pub. Hawakal). The anthology was widely reviewed. One of her video poems on climate change was featured at COP26 summit at Glasgow in 2021. She has co-edited the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2020-21 (Hawakal). She was featured in a documentary on twenty women poets from Asia, produced in Taiwan. She has read at the FILEY Book Fair, Merida, Mexico, Kala Ghoda Arts Festival among others. She is on the Advisory Board of the Tagore Literary Prize. She has curated literary events for PEN Mumbai. Read more about her at vinitawords.com
Nancy Adajania is a Bombay-based cultural theorist and curator. She has curated a number of major research-based exhibitions including the Nelly Sethna retrospective, ‘The Unpaved, Crusty, Earthy Road’ (Chatterjee & Lal with Cymroza Art Gallery, Bombay, 2021); 'Zigzag Afterlives: Film Experiments from the 1960s and 1970s in India' (Camden Art Centre, London, 2020); the Mehlli Gobhai retrospective, ‘Don’t Ask Me About Colour’ (National Gallery of Modern Art/ NGMA, Bombay with Chemould Prescott Road, 2020); the Sudhir Patwardhan retrospective, 'Walking Through Soul City' (NGMA, Bombay with The Guild Art Gallery, 2019) and 'Counter-Canon, Counter-Culture: Alternative Histories of Indian Art' (Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, 2019).
Adajania has proposed several new theoretical models through her extensive writings on subaltern art, media art, public art, collaborative art, transcultural art and the biennale culture in the Global South. She recently conceptualised and led an online curatorial workshop, ‘Once Upon a Cultural Famine: A Curatorial Thought Experiment’, for the Kochi Biennale Foundation (2021).
Adajania was the juror for the Video/Film/New Media fellowship cycle of the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015-2017). During 2013/2014, she taught the curatorial practice course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts. In 2012, she was joint artistic director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale
His first book, Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India (University of Chicago Press, Oxford University Press 2015) was awarded the Joseph Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences by the American Institute of Indian Studies, an Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion by the American Academy of Religion, and was a finalist for the Clifford Geertz Book Prize. He is a co-editor of The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy (Duke University Press, Orient Blackswan 2014), and serves as co-editor of a book series, Thinking from Elsewhere (Fordham University Press). He has published articles on issues of religion, mental health, media, and popular culture, in journals including Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and Contributions to Indian Sociology.
At present he is working on two related book projects: a book of essays on concepts of the psyche titled Waxing and Waning Life: Essays at the Intersection of Anthropology and Psychiatry, and an anthropological monograph titled Life Unsettled, set in the “resettlement colony” of Trilokpuri in East Delhi. These projects emerge from research he has been conducting over the past five years, beginning with a year-long Visiting faculty position in 2015-16 at the Department of Psychiatry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS, Delhi). In 2018-19 he received a writing fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study (Berlin) for his current work on mental health and illness. In collaboration with psychiatrists at AIIMS, he is in the process of creating a consortium for longitudinal research on issues of mental health and urban poverty in India.
Dalvi’s 2012 English translation of Muhammad Iqbal’s influential Urdu work Shikwa and Jawaab-e-Shikwa was Taking Issue and Allah’s Answer (Penguin Classics). It has been described as ‘insolent and heretical’. He is the editor of Man without a Navel a collection of translations of Hemant Divate’s poems from the Marathi (2018, Poetrywala). Mustansir Dalvi was born in Bombay. He is Professor of Architecture at Sir JJ College, Mumbai.
Her studios are based in Berlin in Germany, and Pune and Pondicherry in India. Kundoo’s rigorous research and experimentation in new materiality for architecture is the result of questioning basic assumptions, construction habits that humanity has adopted during the long process of industrialization. Rather than focussing on shortage, she sought abundance through investing in human resources and human resourcefulness, such as ingenuity, time, skills, care and sense of community. The act of building produces knowledge just as the resulting knowledge produces buildings.
He received his training from School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi (B.Arch. 1978), and went on to do a research-based master’s degree in architecture from the University of Oregon, USA (M.Arch. 1982), where he wrote a thesis on the linguistic analogy in architectural theory.
He is a former Executive Director of Srishti Manipal Institute of Art Design & Technology in Bengaluru and is an academic advisor and guest faculty at Indian and international colleges of architecture. In 2016, he was the curator of the centenary national convention of the Indian Institute of Architects on the theme “Imagining the Indian City”.
Besides his design practice at CnT, he writes, lectures and blogs on architecture, urbanism, philosophy, politics, education, environment, art, and cultural studies.
He presently heads a mult-disciplinary team implementing the Nizamuddin Urban Renewal Initiative in Delhi – a project with distinct conservation, environmental development and socio-development components and the conservation initiative in the Quli Qutb Shah Heritage Park in Hyderabad.
He headed the team which overlooked the garden restoration work at Humayun's Tomb in Delhi completed in March 2003. This was also first privately funded restoration of a World Heritage Site in India, undertaken by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) and the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), under the National Culture Fund.
In 2007, Nanda was awarded the Eisenhower Fellowship.
Some of his public art projects include Tandel Fund of Archives, pop-up museum of fisherfolk, Mumbai (2020 & 2019); (En)counters- Daily Rations Public art project, curated by Artoxygen, Breathing art works, Mumbai (2017); Geographies of consumptions, Mumbai (2015); Big Catch, Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Mumbai (2012); and Sandarbh, Rajasthan (2011). Tandel has been a recipient of the Jhunjhunwala Scholarship Award (2003); Maharashtra State Art Award (2003); and All India Art and Craft Society State Award (2003). Additionally, he has participated in residencies at the Banboo Curtain Studio, Taiwan (2018) Piramal Art Residency (2017), Space 118 (2015), Mumbai and in Partapur, Rajasthan.
He currently lives and works in Thane, Mumbai.
He recently co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21).
Demos is also Chair and Chief Curator of the Climate Collective, providing public programming related to the 2021 Climate Emergency > Emergence program at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Maat) in Lisbon. He is presently working on a new book on radical futurisms.
Page, every Sunday, besides his earlier columns like Backlog in Little Magazine and Acid Test in Down to Earth. His comics are regularly published in various journals and anthologies, both in India and
abroad.
Associated with ‘Inverted Commas’ a communications initiative, he is currently working on a mapping project in the wokers’ clusters of Gurgaon.
As a founder member of the Pao Collective, he also remains an active and dynamic participant in graphic/comics artists’ collective projects and works often with graphic artists from different parts of South Asia.
He has published several books and booklets in English and Hindi, the latest being, Dalit aur Prakriti: Jati aur Bhartiya Paryavarn Aaandolan (2020, in Hindi), Caste & Nature: Dalits and Indian Environmental Politics (2017), Green and Saffron: Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics (2012), and Human Rights in a Globalised World: An Indian Diary (2010).
Mukul worked as a Special Correspondent in Navbharat Times, and received 12 national-international awards for his environmental, rural and human rights journalism. After that, he has been the Director of Amnesty International and Heinrich Boell Foundation-India, the South Asia Director of Climate Parliament and the Asia Campaign, Advocacy and Policy Director of ActionAid International.
His research interests lie in examining the relations between nature, culture, politics, policy and power. He focuses on the interweaving of ecology, religion, politics and media in the making of environmental politics in India and South Asia. He is presently working on ‘Dalit Ecologies: Caste and Environmental Justice’ and ‘Bihar, 1947-2020: Demography, Ecology and Politics’ (co-authored).
Goody completed her BA in Sociology at Fergusson College in Pune in 2011, and an MA in Visual Anthropology at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, England in 2013.
Goody's art practice is informed by her academic background and her Ambedkarite roots. Through writing, ceramics, photography, and sculpture, she attempts to decode and make visible instances of everyday power and resistance within Dalit communities in India.
In July 2018 she had a solo show, Eat With Great Delight, at Clark House Initiative, Mumbai. Selected group exhibitions include Hungry For Time, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria, 2021; At The Kitchen Table, One Shanthi Road, Bengaluru, 2021; Imprint After at Pulp Society, New Delhi, 2020; Sunnata Samanta at Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi, 2020; Look Outside This House at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, 2019; Body Building at Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, 2019; Experiment with Truth, Sahmat, New Delhi, 2019; Within/Without, Asia House, London, 2018; Working Practices, The Showroom, London, 2018; Revelations: Reclaiming South Asian Narratives, Harvard University, Cambridge, 2018; and World Next Door, Khoj International, New Delhi, 2017. Her work has also been presented at literature festivals in India.
Goody is currently an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam.. Her previous residencies and fellowships took place at Art Omi, Ghent; ISCP, New York; Harvard University, Cambridge; Khoj International, New Delhi; Asia Culture Centre, Gwangju; Bamboo Curtain Studio, Taipei; Piramal Art Residency, Mumbai; and TIFA, Pune. In 2018, she was awarded the Emerging Artist Award by India Today.
© Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, Photo: Andrea Fernandes
Amruta Nemivant completed her MA History of Art from University of York, UK. She began her career in the Research and Archiving Department of Osian’s Art Auctions and later joined Bodhi Art Gallery as a curator. Nemivant also worked as a studio manager for artists Hema and Chintan Upadhyay and later joined Project 88, a Mumbai-based gallery as their Associate Director. She is currently working at the programme department of Goethe-Institut Mumbai focusing on different cultural projects especially their visual arts programme.
© Ranjit Hoskote, Photo: Nancy Adajania
Ranjit Hoskote is a leading Anglophone Indian poet, and has also been acclaimed as a seminal contributor to Indian art criticism. His books include Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014), Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, 2018), and Icelight (Wesleyan University Press & Penguin, 2023). His poetry has appeared in German translation as Die Ankunft der Vögel (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006) and Feldnotizen des Magiers (Editions Offenes Feld, 2015). His translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011).Hoskote was a Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, and has been writer-in-residence at Villa Waldberta, Munich; Theater der Welt, Essen-Mülheim; and the Polish Institute, Berlin. He has been researcher-in-residence at BAK/ basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. He has received the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award for Translation, and the S H Raza Award for Literature. Hoskote was juror for international literature for the 2015-2017 fellowship cycle at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. He has also served two terms on the International Advisory Board of the HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. In 2011, Hoskote curated India’s first ever standalone national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He and architect Professor Rahul Mehrotra were an invited position at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
