In this workshop Diana Campbell will share case studies and speak about her curatorial process of commissioning artworks for different exhibitionary formats. She will discuss how using co-curating and co-commissioning as a collaborative strategy, and working across multiple platforms and institutions, curators can work together to create opportunities for artists and sustain creative spaces.

Diana Campbell (Los Angeles, 1984) is a Princeton educated American curator who has been working in South and Southeast Asia since 2010, primarily in India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. Since 2013, she has served as the Founding Artistic Director of Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation, Bangladesh and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, leading the critically acclaimed 2014-2023 editions and currently imagining the 2025 and 2027 chapters as a continuous ongoing curatorial project which builds infrastructure and new models for contemporary art making and public engagement with culture. In addition to her exhibitions making practice, Campbell is responsible for developing the Samdani Art Foundation collection and drives its international collaborations ahead of opening the foundation’s permanent home, Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet. Concurrent to her work in Bangladesh from 2016-2018, she was also the Founding Artistic Director of Bellas Artes Projects in the Philippines, a non-profit international residency and exhibition program with sites in Manila and Bataan, and curated Frieze Projects in London for the 2018 and 2019 editions of the fair. She curated the 2023 edition of Desert X with Neville Wakefield in the Coachella Valley, California, and is on the facilitation group of AFIELD, an international network of socially engaged artistic practices. Her writing has been published by Mousse, Frieze, Art in America, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) among others.

This workshop, in conjunction to the Very Small Feelings (VSF) exhibition, will primarily explore the medium of textile and its versatility. Starting with a walkthrough of the show to activate one’s imagination, the workshop will bring participants together to collectively build a large soft sculpture based on fictional characters – unique and peculiar, containing a multitude of faces, bellies and even several limbs. Bringing to life an imagined character through amplified voices, the workshop will explore an interactive and participatory group dynamic. Interested and committed participants (16+) are expected to attend the entire duration of the workshop. Prior handling of textiles is not required. Art material and refreshments will be provided. The onsite workshop with limited seats will be held at KNMA Saket.

Using craft techniques in novel ways, Afra Eisma explores and manifests personal stories through immersive and intimate installations made of textiles, sculptures, ceramics, papier-maché and sound. Afra Eisma’s work focuses on emotions as an inner source of strength. What’s important to her is to seek ways in which trauma can be a tool of power and of change. The seemingly bright and colourful installations are a strategy to look at sensitive issues, or to look at darker corners of personal experiences and through seduction and accessibility move the viewer to engage with the subjects at play. Recently Eisma’s focuses on creating immersive installations in which the viewer has an active role. The sanctuary becomes an extension of the body. Generosity as a form of resistance.

After Eisma’s first institutional solo exhibition in 1646 (the Hague, NL) she was invited to make a commissioned installation for Kunstinstuut Melly in Rotterdam. Ever since, Eisma has been invited to international institutes and projects such as Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães (PT), Fundació Joan Miró (ES), the Dhaka Art Summit 2023 (BD), Textile Museum Tilburg (NL), Fries Museum (NL) and has upcoming exhibitions at The Tetley Leeds (UK) and Wälnö Aaltosen Museo, Finland.

We are born and formed out of protein strands that spiral together to form the building blocks of our very existence. That life itself is cyclical - just as the formation and destruction of the universe is a continual process of creation, formation, decay, destruction and regeneration. The technique of folding (and unfolding) are fundamental to these cyclical processes. In order to pay homage to this eternal, the workshop will focus on the process of folding circles into helical spirals (helicoids) while combining elements of origami and architecture. The simplest circle shape when folded in different ways creates a multitude of modules that in turn help to create an entire cosmos of geometries, just like the simplest atoms become the building blocks of all the conceivable complexity of the universe.

Interested and committed participants (18+) are expected to attend the entire duration of the workshop. Participants with a basic understanding of geometric concepts may enjoy the process more. Art material and refreshments will be provided. The onsite workshop with limited seats will be held at KNMA Saket.

Ankon Mitra is a trained architect and practices as a sculptor. He has built an international reputation as a pioneer of the folding technique through his diverse projects. Recipient of the All-India Gold Medal for Sculpture from the Prafulla Dahanukar Foundation in 2018 and the Lexus Design Award for Craft Design in 2020, his work has been exhibited in India, Italy, France, UK, USA, Japan, the Netherlands, Brazil and China. His sculptures and installations are part of public developments and private collections globally. A TEDx speaker and a warrior for 'making connections across disciplines' with his brainchild - ‘Oritecture - Origami + Architecture’, Mitra shares a unique vision of a universe forming and dissolving from acts of folding.

In this workshop participants will learn how to hand cut stencils to create clean lines, precise compositions and play with colour. Interested and committed participants (18+) are expected to attend the entire duration of the workshop. Art material and refreshments will be provided. The onsite workshop with limited seats will be held at KNMA Saket.

Ashna Malik (b. 1998 New Delhi, India) is a multidisciplinary artist who uses a combination of traditional and digital media to investigate ideas of perception, distortion, immersion and experience. Currently based in New Delhi, India she has exhibited her work and is included in private collections in the United States, France, and India, including her most recent solo show at Method, 'Lines of Inquiry'

Through paintings and interactive projections, Malik aims to have the viewer question their limited perception and understanding of reality through stimulating visuals. Using a combination of digital and traditional media, Malik pushes boundaries and provides the viewer with an encapsulating experience. Dynamic lines and vibrant colours create movement and distortion through optical play challenging the viewer’s perception of what they see and understand.

In this workshop participants will approach the process of marking a surface through a layer of carbon paperThis indirect approach at times helps to reflect and unlock our imagination and curiosity. The process in itself is an amalgamation of direct points, moments, events, and conversations in time. The aim of this workshop is to weave all these non-linear narratives on a surface, which in itself is the ‘one point’ that binds all these narratives together.This workshop is an exercise to understand how this excess of information around us can be absorbed or incorporated into an art practice. It will be drawing based and will involve different processes of mark making, cutting, collaging, making paper cut outs and even writing.

Important: Interested and committed participants (18+) are expected to attend the entire duration of the workshop. Drawing material and refreshments will be provided. Each participant will be required to bring two small found objects of different textures. The objects can range from thread, pieces of gauze, cloth, leaves, or even a personal item.

The onsite workshop with limited seats will be held at KNMA Saket.

Swati Kumari is a visual practitioner based in Delhi who loves to experiment with different mediums and techniques. She uses carbon paper, stitching, photobooks, zines, and paintings to create works that invite the viewer to engage in a dialogue with them. Her works reflect her curiosity about life, love, memory, and the everyday interactions with her environment. She holds a BFA in painting from the College of Art, Delhi, and a Master’s in Visual Arts from Ambedkar University, Delhi. She currently works as a research and curatorial associate at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.

During this workshop, participants will explore stop motion animation through charcoal drawings. Animation is a medium that makes it possible to experience a drawing in time. It allows us to see it grow, change and evolve. Each participant will create a short animation clip using charcoal and a paper.

Important: Interested and committed participants (18+) are expected to attend the entire duration of the workshop. Drawing materials and refreshments will be provided. The onsite workshop with limited seats will be held at KNMA Saket. Participants are required to download the following animation application in their mobile phones prior to the workshop - Application: Stop Motion Studio for Android and iMotion for iPhone or iPad.

Anarya is an illustrator, animator and art educator based in Delhi. Mixed media illustrations, watercolour painting and digitally hand drawn stop-motion animation are some of the mediums she is presently exploring. You can find her loitering around the city with her sketchbook, head up at the sky trying to spot birds. 

Presently she is working as Programmes Manager at Artreach India and teaching as a guest faculty in Visual Effects and Animation, Jamia Milia Islamia University, Delhi.

We are constantly exposed to a range of images and text on a daily basis. Often these appear to us in the form of news reports, advertisements, photographs, social media posts and in many other formats. We also sometimes have our personal archives of information in the form of texts and images – things which we might have collected over a span of time or certain things of personal interests.

This workshop is an exercise to understand how this excess of information around us can be absorbed or incorporated into an art practice. How this information goes beyond their visual representation and shapes up our perception of the world around us and how we can act as someone who intervenes and recreates this information as an act of world-viewing and world building.

The intention of this workshop is to have something process oriented which may or may not be conclusive. It will be drawing based and will involve different processes of mark making, cutting, collaging, making paper cut outs and maybe even writing.

Important: Interested and committed participants (18+) are expected to attend the entire duration of the workshop. Basic drawing and writing material will be provided. Every participant will be required to bring 5 – 10 images or/and text excerpts which they feel might relate to the themes of memory, identity, ecology, gender, ruins and control. These can be news reports, social media posts, personal collection of photographs, advertisements, any archival material, maps, excerpts or images from books or anything from print media.

The onsite workshop with limited seats will be held at Vadehra Art Gallery

Shrimanti Saha is an artist, working in the medium of drawing, painting and animation. In her work, Saha draws references from a range of sources like history, literature, mythology, comic books, art history, science fiction, philosophy, miniature painting, movies, architecture, encyclopaedias, news reports as well as memory, conversation and personal experiences. This leads to the formation of layered story structures that can be construed as a personal mythology, alternative history or as an anthology of untold stories; touching upon the themes of identity, gender, violence and exploitation.

Saha completed her BVA and MVA from M.S. University, Vadodara. She has participated in various group shows in India and abroad. She received the Inlaks fine arts award and the Fica Amol Vadehra art grant. She has also been part of international artist residencies like the Bemis Center for Contemporary arts, USA; Vermont Studio Center and Art Omi, New York.

Through this workshop, participants will explore the relation of land and labour through the medium of text and image. Participants will think about how the land and labour relation takes shape across imaginations and interpretations of its many metaphors, through the poetics of making and reading together.

For the reading session, we invite all participants to bring with them short excerpts of texts that explore or express in some form the expanse of the topic and its associated visuals, metaphors, poetics, and politics. With these texts, we will be structuring a collectively sourced pool of readings and digital/drawn images that will serve as raw material for the image-making/collage exercise.

The texts can be in any language, and we encourage participants to consider poetic references. We welcome texts from across genres of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and/or critical writing. As we will be reading aloud our collectively sourced texts together, please excerpt up to only 1 - 2 paragraphs of long prose or poem otherwise short texts; would be ideal

Important: Interested and committed participants (18+) are expected to attend the entire duration of the workshop. Basic drawing and writing material will be provided. Participants are requested to bring anything additional they may wish to carry with them, including but not limited to drawing implements, notebooks, diaries etc. Those working with digital media are welcome to bring their devices (laptops, iPads, tablets) with them. The onsite workshop with limited seats will be held at KNMA Saket.

A formal training in Visual Arts combined with his lived experiences– engagement with local people and their everyday realities in many hinterlands of India has given Anupam Roy’s artistic practices a distinct characteristic. His works emanate a grounded vitality that is palpably people centric and often an expression of his strong dissent against the dominating dystopian regimes and development aggression.

Anupam has a master’s degree in Visual Arts from the Ambedkar University Delhi in the year 2016 and a second Master’s in Fine Arts from the De Montfort University Leicester, UK in 2020. His works were part of the 2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage, New Museum New York. He also took part in several group shows and art fairs including Frieze Fair, London; Indian Art Fair, Delhi and “Historical Materialism”, Montreal. In 2019 Anupam has his first gallery solo at Project 88 Mumbai. He has presented his works and thoughts in many seminars, panel discussions and workshops at the premier institutes like SOAS London and Bordeaux Montaigne University. He had his most recent solo show in December 2022 in Vadhera Art Gallery Delhi. Anupam is a recipient of the Charles Wallace long-term scholarship (2019-2020) and the FICA Emerging Artists Award (2018).

Besides showing his works in the galleries and arts spaces Anupam works tirelessly as a designer-campaigner, designing political posters, signages and graffiti and installing them at the site, often the site of an ongoing protest. In December 2022 Anupam joined as an Associate professor at Department of Art, Media and Performance, Shiv Nadar University, SNIOE, Greater Noida.

A square is said to represent orientation and direction, proper structure, balance, logic and law and order. For the past 3 years now Chetnaa’s practice has been revolving around disintegrating this basic shape: an exploration of balance between positive and negative space, presence and absence. A square has offered many possibilities within a set parameter yet forced me to always go beyond its limits.

This one-day workshop titled ‘Within A Square’, intends the participant to go deeper in understanding and exploring the various facets and possibilities that can be offered within a four sided shape. A Square can be dissected, painted, elevated, divided mathematically into further squares to create a unique symphony of its own.

Important: Interested and committed participants (18+) are expected to attend the entire duration of the workshop. Art material and refreshments will be provided. The onsite workshop with limited seats will be held at KNMA Saket.

Bio: Chetnaa

Born in 1981 in New Delhi, Chetnaa completed her Master’s degree in Painting from the College of Art in New Delhi. Her geometric abstractions are drawn largely from the landscape and architecture of her city : keen observations of the metropolis translated into an eloquent schematic of lines and markers. Initiated as symmetrical arrangements, Chetnaa’s work reveals the need to deconstruct the order she once sought, so as to build a new geometric logic that feeds her minimalist aesthetic. She recently presented a solo focus booth, ‘Sacred Square : 101 Meditations on Paper’, at the India Art Fair 2022 with Anupa Mehta Arts & Advisory and has had four solo shows, with a special online & a physical solo presentation ‘P = 4L, {Deconstructing Square Space}’ & has participated in many exhibitions in India and around the world. She has been a part of Inner Life of Things : Around Anatomies & Armatures, Group show, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2022; State of Mind: Between Dysphoria & Hope, group show, curated by Sayali Mundye, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2021; Abstract Notations, online group show, curated by Jesal Thacker, Gallery Espace, New Delhi, 2020 ; All is Not Lost 20:20:20, group show curated by Saloni Doshi at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2020 and many others such exhibitions.

Methods : A series of artist led medium workshops organized by KNMA

The force driving at the crux of the segment has been to re-examine the mandate of a medium centric ‘workshop’ and looks beyond the usual format of craft-hobby workroom sessions. At the heart of each session is a chosen artist with their unique style of expression and fashioned in an actively interactive module of facilitator-participant format. This KNMA series highlights how the paradigmatic shifts in contemporary art making need to be registered at individual levels and not merely as institutional applied skill dissemination. The workshop opens up room for both artists and non-artists as well as keen learners to interact with practitioners from a wide spectrum of styles and media to reimagine the tools and raw material for art making - ranging from drawings, maps, personal memories to printing techniques to textual excerpts to found or broken objects, just to name a few.

This Intensive on Performance Art explores the practice and repertoire specific to the two artists, Inder Salim and Nancy Popp through dialogic lectures and participative workshops.

Interested and committed participants (18+) are expected to attend the entire duration of the lecture and workshop on both the days.

Inder Salim was born in Kashmir in 1960. He is a conceptual performance artist and poet practicing for over 30 years. Reflecting upon the relationship between art and its relevance to the world he lives in, Inder Salim has performed at different venues in India and abroad. He curated Art Karavan International in 2010, where 30 artists from India and aboard travelled for two and a half months through nine cities in Northern India, with the objective of experimenting with open-ended interactive processes of art. He Created Harkat series of Performance Art at Sarai basement in 2011. He was a Mentor at City-as-studio programme by Raqs Media Collective, 2012. He also received the India Foundation for Arts grant and Fellowship in 2013. In 2021, his works during the pandemic got featured at Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai and Hangzhou Triennial 2022. He is a Visiting faculty at Ambedkar University Delhi, National School of Drama and has conducted workshops at various colleges and universities in India. Currently he is working on two books, Ghazal Numa ( book of images ) and a book of poems about Kashmir and other places. The artists lives and works in Delhi.

Nancy Popp, a Los Angeles-born artist, educator, and organizer, creates performances, direct political interventions, and community work which engages architectural and public space and addresses issues of land use and tenants’ rights. Popp’s practice centers around performance works and direct political interventions exploring relations between bodies, the situational context enveloping them, and the nodes interconnecting them. An educator for nearly 20 years, she has taught at institutions such as Harvard-Westlake School, OTIS College of Art and Design’s Public Practice Master’s Program, and Idyllwild Arts Academy as the Interdisciplinary Arts Department Chair. A writer for various magazines and websites on art, education, and politics, Popp holds degrees from Art Center College of Design and the San Francisco Art Institute and is currently working on a Juris Doctorate. As part of her Fulbright-Nehru project, Popp is currently teaching public art, site-specific art, and performance art practices as a visiting artist/guest lecturer at Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal.

Methods : A series of artist led medium workshops organised by KNMA

The force driving at the crux of the segment has been to re-examine the mandate of a medium centric ‘workshop’ and looks beyond the usual format of craft-hobby workroom sessions. At the heart of each session is a chosen artist with their unique style of expression and fashioned in an actively interactive module of facilitator-participant format. This KNMA series highlights how the paradigmatic shifts in contemporary art making need to be registered at individual levels and not merely as institutional applied skill dissemination. The workshop opens up room for both artists and non-artists as well as keen learners to interact with practitioners from a wide spectrum of styles and media to reimagine the tools and raw material for art making - ranging from drawings, maps, personal memories to printing techniques to textual excerpts to found or broken objects, just to name a few.

Module curators: Neha Tickoo and Madhurima Chaudhuri