This four-day online intensive, focuses on aspects of care and ownership of common resources, in particular water and other shared natural resources. From ongoing inquiries in her artistic practice, artist Vibha Galhotra poses the following questions to be collectively addressed in the intensive: what do we know about our impact on global and local ecosystems? What steps and methods can we undertake to increase our awareness of and intervention into the subject? Can art instill a sense of caution and care in our collective fight for environmental equality and justice? The intensive is open to anyone interested in engaging and working with these questions and revisiting human's relationship to the natural world.

During the course of the workshop, environmentalists and experts on environment justice and urban ecosystems will interact with the group of participants, to think through the importance of care in relation to common resources. With specific case studies, sessions will explore how day-to-day elements of our sustainable ecosystems are affected, damaged and erased from our memory. The workshop will indulge participants to find their belonging with nature and weave their tacit and forgotten knowledge into a collective artwork.

Vibha Galhotra will share how her methods and engagement as an artist working around the questions of the environment and how over the years that has translated across different materials and concepts. We will move from a collective dining experience to discussing implicit relationship between the quality of water and food production, water heritage, lost ecologies, urban utopias, and towards drafting fables for the futures we want to imagine. The workshop is activity and discussion-based. The workshop will involve cooking as well as few exercises with easily accessible household materials such as threads, buttons, beads, sand, needle, glue, piece of cloth, handkerchief etc. Interested participants are expected to commit their presence on all days and undertake some group work between the sessions. The age limit for participation is 18 years and above. Towards the end, workshop will explore the possibility of further collaborative work.

Vibha Galhotra is a New Delhi-based conceptual artist, working in a variety of media, including sculpture, photography, printmaking, video, drawing, and text. Her work is influenced by nature, climate change, and the anthropogenic issues of our age. Her large-scale sculptural works address the shifting topography of the world under the impact of globalization. She has shown extensively in India, New York as well as internationally, with many projects that involve diverse communities and their regions.

Galhotra currently is a fellow of the Jerusalem International Fellow Program, 2020. She was awarded the Asia Arts Future Award, 2019, the Asian Cultural Council Fellow, 2017, and the prestigious Rockefeller Grant, 2016. Galhotra was born in the North of India, where she spent her formative years doing her Bachelors in Fine Art at Government College of Arts, Chandigarh followed by Masters of Fine Arts at Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, India.

This is the fifth program of the ‘The Artists’ Way’ series of experimental online intensives organized by KNMA. These intensive are led by practicing artists who have been using workshops as part of their art making process, often collaborating with different groups and forming their own personal, formal and informal networks of learning and unlearning. The series is imagined as an exploratory platform, with part pedagogic intent and infused with new questions, doubts, playfulness and also involving a collective/collaborative production towards the end of the workshop. The program is part of KNMA Education Outreach, with the focus on artistic research as new pedagogies of the future. Each workshop is unique, different in format, scope and methodology, wherein artists also share their related research. ‘The Artists’ Way’ program is outlined by Akansha Rastogi, with Madhurima Chaudhuri, Priya Chandra and Neha Tickoo.

This online workshop proposes the Tai Chi based exercise of ‘pushing hands’ as a model of practice that moves with incoming force to redirect it or allow it to exhaust itself. It will be a collective exercise for up to 10 practitioners in shaping projects in development through the lenses of: risk, authorship and tactics for togetherness.

The workshop approaches the curatorial as an open field of inquiry into a wide range of contemporary conditions, stances, materials, spatial, organizational, personal and group dynamics. It invites participants to articulate difficult questions and urgencies emerging from their own curatorial and artistic research. It is conceived as a peer-exchange and discussion based three-hour long session with the aim of prompting processes of rethinking the frameworks and negotiations involved in staging difficult conversations via the curatorial as both site and method.

The workshop has limited spots. We welcome registration from artists, curators and researchers who are interested in openly engaging with questions of ethics and curatorial thinking. Participants will be selected based on their application and diversity of the group. We collectively intend to make this workshop a safe, non-competitive and non-judgmental space for practitioners to share and talk through ongoing inquiries and collectively through questions and doubts. The workshop will be recorded but not made available publicly. However, a limited-time view-only link will be shared with the participants.

Hammad Nasar is a London-based curator, researcher and strategic advisor. He is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, where he co-leads the ‘London, Asia’ project; Principal Research Fellow at the Decolonising Arts Institute, UAL where is developing the ‘Curating Nation’ project; and co-curator of British Art Show 9. He was the inaugural Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, London (2018-19); Head of Research & Programmes at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2012-16); and, co-founded the pioneering hybrid arts organisation, Green Cardamom, London (2004-12). Known for collaborative, research-driven and exhibition-led inquiry, he has curated numerous exhibitions internationally. Nasar has served in advisory, trustee and board roles for numerous organisations including: Mophradat (Belgium), British Council, Delfina Foundation, Iniva, Manchester Art Gallery, Tate Etc. and Whitechapel Gallery (UK), Lahore Biennale Foundation (Pakistan) and Alserkal Avenue (UAE). He is a member of the expert panel for Art and Design, History, Practice and Theory as part of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF 2021).

The ‘Pushing Hands’ workshop is part of ‘Research as Practice’ lecture series, organised under KNMA Education Outreach program.

Registration open until 1 April 2021

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art presents I CONTAIN MULTITUDES: A workshop on portraiture and creations facilitated by artist Anish Cherian. This two-day online workshop invites participants to reflect on portraits, characters, narrative, theme, and events in figurative drawings. Through individual and collective drawing exercises, using ideas and techniques in duplication, mark-making, and iconography, the workshop will explore the creation and reading signs or semiotic systems of meaning-making.

This workshop is suitable for those who have basic skills in drawing and are comfortable using digital drawing platforms. Participants will learn and work with Autodesk Sketchbook mobile application, and therefore are required to have a mobile device with the application pre-installed. Participants can also use other drawing surfaces and materials in addition. The sessions will be held on Zoom. Attending both days is mandatory. The workshop has limited seats.

Anish Cherian is a visual and performance artist based in Goa. He uses elements from architecture and modes of production to discuss systems of influence. Through these, he explores the visible and invisible performances of repetitive labor. His works can almost always be traced back to an archive, either personal or public. Yet, it is not the verifiability of the archive that he pursues. Going beyond archival abstractions his practice attempts to revitalize unrecordable memories and affects that are excluded from the archive and by extension the “official” narrative of our reality. He is a recipient of the Legislative Assistant for Member of Parliament Fellowship and resident at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. His drawings are currently part of an ongoing group show at KNMA titled, 'Right to Laziness...No, strike that! Sidewalking with the man saying sorry' curated by Akansha Rastogi.

A space that one occupies, evokes a strong connection and leaves indelible impressions in one's mind. How do we make sense of these places visually with the attachments and emotions we associate with it? During the course of this pandemic we may have been confined to our homes, cities, alternate living spaces, spending time navigating it, that we have now developed muscle memories of that place. We know where each object is kept and have an associated emotion of each room we have occupied. We are able to visualize these spaces with our eyes closed. How do we interpret these places through drawing? Conversely we have yearnings of a place we wish to go to, walk on a particular street, go to our own house, a park, places within our city or our hometown itself. How do we draw the memory of these places and our imagination of them that may morph and adapt the images we have in our minds?

On a macro level if we think about the idea of mapping space, the strongest sentiments are evoked when one deals with issues of identity, where migration, loss, partition and the memories of home or the lack there of and or world events such as political and social changes feeds into the creative process. To channel all of that information, memory and emotion to make work that is poignant and visually provocative is a process of mapping spaces that we will delve into through this workshop by referencing works of artist Zarina Hashmi and her creative process.

Using drawing and collage through memory, maps and image, this 3-day workshop shall use various tools and techniques to distill images of places using imagined, remembered and real references in making an original map or a small series of them. All the sessions will be held on Zoom. Participation on all three days is mandatory.

Materials to be arranged by each participant:
A laptop with high speed internet, Scissors, ruler, old scrap magazine, pens, pencils – 2b, 4b, 6b pencils, charcoal pencil, black craft paper, paper cutter, fevicol, black drawing ink, old paint brush, eraser, A4 or A3 200-300 gsm drawing paper (loose or sketchbook format works), a writing notebook, small water container.

Participant eligibility
Basic skill and knowledge of drawing and using drawing material

Sareena Khemka is a visual artist working in mixed media drawing, painting and sculptural installations. Mapping cityscapes through narratives of its past and the future, her preoccupation with building a research-based practice on the subject has led her to work with several mediums that started with drawing and now includes sculpture and found object. Her current practice explores urban spaces through dichotomous ideas of construction and destruction, preservation and regeneration, man-made and organic environments, creating transformative spaces and objects that recall historical ruins and geological formations that have the potential for material evolution. Khemka holds a B.F.A degree in painting from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan. She has been a part of several group shows across India and has been a resident artist with Space 118, Mumbai and Piramal Art Foundation, Mumbai. She has conducted art workshops with the Art 1st Foundation, Mumbai, Mohile Parikh Center, Mumbai, Sangeet Shyamala, New Delhi amongst many others. The artist currently lives and works in Bangalore.

In the opening sections of More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998), Kodwo Eshun emphasizes that sound is a mode of thinking in itself and not merely that which is to be thought about.

Taking off from this concept and diving into the act of ‘fictioning’, the workshop explores possibilities of thinking through listening and transmitting earworms. A field of speculations and counter-speculations is seen to emerge from tuning in to the interstices of sound in existing narratives and apparatus – political, historical, technological and infrastructural. In the process of unearthing these, participants will be invited to a collective investigation into the philosophical and techno-political dimensions of voice, frequency and the audible. We start with a simple inquiry of ‘what does an earworm mean to you?’

The five sessions will delve into the practice of listening as a means of speculation, examining its many sensorial and generative possibilities. From leaning into the disquiet in science-fiction writings to the fictions that are always inhabiting the ‘real’ of the world, this intensive short-module will unpack and unsettle the field of the aural, and attempt to open the question of the ‘sensible’. Participants will collectively engage with the philosophical mediations on ‘listening’ by Jean Luc Nancy and the conceptual artefacts of Kodwo Eshun, while developing conversations around ideas of amplification, resonances, disquiet and acoustic dislocation or displacement across different mediums and technologies.

Intended as a participatory and discursive format, the workshop will follow an exercise-based methodology, along with a series of guest interventions that will catalyse our modes of sonic thinking and making. Participants will have access to a library of earworms specially populated for and during the sessions, viewing and listening materials, resources and readings.

This online workshop is free. Interested participants are expected to commit their presence on all days and undertake some group work between the sessions. The age limit for participation is 18 years and above. The workshop will explore the possibility of further collaborative work towards the end.

Suvani Suri is an artist and researcher based in New Delhi, India. Her interests and inter-media experiments have been tethered to the auditory spectrum, encountering and speculating its multi-fold possibilities. She has been exploring various modes of transmission such as podcasts, auditory texts, sonic environments, installations and live interventions. Alongside she has been actively involved in teaching at several universities and educational spaces.

This is the fourth program of the ‘The Artists’ Way’ series of experimental workshops, organized virtually by KNMA. These workshops are led by practicing artists who have been using workshops as part of their art making process, often collaborating with different groups and forming their own personal, formal and informal networks of learning and unlearning. The series is imagined as an exploratory platform, with part pedagogic intent and infused with new questions, doubts, playfulness and sometimes also involving a collective/collaborative production towards the end of the workshop. The program is part of KNMA Education Outreach, with the focus on artistic research as new pedagogies of the future. Each workshop is unique, different in format, scope and methodology, wherein artists also share their related research. ‘The Artists’ Way’ program is outlined by Akansha Rastogi, with Madhurima Chaudhuri, Neha Tickoo, Rajshree Poonam Gupta and Priya Chandra.