Afruz Amighi lives and works in New York. She completed her MFA at New York University, New York in 2007. She was the recipient of the Jameel Prize, V & A Museum in 2009.
Aninditta Dutta
Aninditta Dutta lives and works between India and the United States of America. Currently Dutta is one of the artists selected for the residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York. She graduated from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2005 and has been the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundations Grant as well as the UNESCO Aschberg Bursaries for Artist Fellowship.
Divya Mehra
Divya Mehra is a multimedia artist who recently earned an MFA from Columbia University, New York. She obtained her BFA with Honors from
the University of Manitoba’s School of Art. In her practice she explores issues of cultural displacement and hybridization, deploying a humorous perspective in the execution of the works. Her work has been included in a number of exhibitions and screenings across North America.
Mariam Ghani
Mariam Ghani is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work explores how histories, places, identities and communities are constructed and reconstructed. She has been awarded the NYFA and Soros Fellowships, grants from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Experimental Television Center, and residencies at LMCC, Eyebeam Atelier, Smack Mellon, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. Her work in video, installation and photography has been exhibited and screened internationally, including at the Sharjah Biennial, the Liverpool Biennial, the Tate Modern, the National Gallery in DC, the New York Video Festival, the Asia Society, the Danish Film Institute, transmediale and PLAY in Berlin, Smart Project Space, Gemak and the Stadsgalerij Heerlen in the Netherlands, Futura in Prague, Curtacinema in Rio de Janeiro, EMAP in Seoul, d/Art in Sydney, Bodhi Art in Mumbai, and the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens Museums. Her public, community-based and interactive projects have been commissioned by Creative Time, Turbulence, artwurl, the Longwood Digital Matrix, CEPA in Buffalo, and the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn for its inaugural exhibition. Her critical writing on disappearance, warm data, and networked archives has been featured in FUSE, Viralnet, Pavilion, the Sarai Reader 05, Samar, Arts and Leisure, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Press coverage includes the New York Times, New York Sun, Brooklyn Rail, CBS and WNYC, locally; the Stuttgarter Zeitung, Beirut’s Daily Star, Brazil’s O Globo, the Prague Post, New Delhi’s Business Standard and EPW, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the VOA and BBC Persian radio services, internationally; and Artforum, Art Asia Pacific, Art India, Afterimage, Bidoun, Studies in Documentary Film, the Independent, the Fader, Viralnet and RES, in the art press. Ghani also lectures widely and organizes/moderates exhibitions, workshops, and discussions. She has a B.A. in Comparative Literature from NYU and an MFA in Photography, Video & Related Media from SVA, and currently teaches at Parsons and Cooper Union.
Nidhi Jalan
Nidhi Jalan is an Indian artist currently living and working between New York and Calcutta. She received her MFA from Hunter College, New York and attended The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. Jalan explores the other side of humor in the notion that everything has the other side. In her culture this philosophy of dualism and co-existence of opposing forces is fundamental. Her artwork takes form through three dimensional objects and installations. It is an intermingling of past and present experiences. The work begins intuitively and emotionally but gets encoded during the process. Process and time are important aspects of the work and define the work to a large extent. The tension created by unpredictability and transformation is exciting for me. Lately her work is more about 'vanitas'. It is a message that tells the viewer that the pleasure of life only lasts a moment: because time is limited, live fully the present moment.
Rajkamal Kahlon
Rajkamal Kahlon interrogates the ideological positions of representation as they are linked to forms of racial and colonial authority. In her dialectical engagement with historical and contemporary text and image-based material, she critiques the will to "make" humans implicit in the visual practices backed by repressive regimes of power. She does this in part through the use of violent imagery framed by psychedelia and the human body turned grotesque through its traumatic encounters with colonialism, military rule, and torture. Kahlon was a 2006 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award and is a current recipient of the 2007–10 recipient of the Lambent Fellowship. Kahlon's work has been exhibited coast to coast at the Queens Museum, the Bronx Museum, and the Oakland Museum of California, as well as at the following New York-based exhibition organizations: White Box, Artists Space, and Apex Art. She also has exhibited internationally. Kahlon's work has been reviewed in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Asia Pacific and The Brooklyn Rail.
Kahlon recently completed her first public artwork as part of the 2008 Emerging Artist Fellowship Program. She also is a past participant of the Whitney Independent Study Program at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Redo Pakistan (Fatima Hussain and Hamja Ahsan)
Pakistan was founded by Mohammed Ali Jinnah in 1947 who served as its first Governor-General. Over the decades it has been founded again and again geographically, politically and intellectually by the temporary Governments, unstable rulers, natural hazards, and the political super powers.
What if, Pakistan was to be restored, stabilized today by the social envisioners? What would a Pakistan, reconstructed today, look like?
What if instead of the super powers renovating the third world nations, were to leave one country in the hands of the social envisioners? How do you fantasize remodelling the land, geographically, politically, intellectually?Redo Pakistan is a quarterly newspaper, printed and published in Lahore, Pakistan and is distributed internationally.
Other Asias was founded in 2008. Before its formal organisation, Other Asias started as a conversation between friends on a bus that evolved in the Central Saint Martins library on Charing Cross after a screening of Bangladeshi short films in East London. Its context was the plethora of regional survey shows from the recent commercial booms of Asian economies, the crescendos around "crisis of Multiculturalism" in parliamentary rhethoric, the rise of Asia global power and decline of unipoplar West.
Over time Other Asia's collectively discussed bad "Human rights" arts, humorous misreadings by ignorant Westerners, crass and harmful representations of Islamic people, the shortcomings of BME public inclusion strategies and the NGOisation of third world subjects.
They stole their name from a Gayatri Spivak book.
Swati Khurana
Swati Khurana is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work has been shown locally at Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, Bose Pacia, Center
for Book Arts, Exit Art, Momenta Art, Jersey City Museum, and Rush Arts; and internationally in Costa Rica, The Gambia, Italy, India, and
Nepal. Awards nclude: Jerome Foundation, Bronx Museum’s Artist-in-Marketplace, Aljira’s Emerge, and Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has
had residencies at Henry Street Settlement, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Pace University, and Kartong Village Development Committee (The
Gambia, West Africa). She will be presenting her newest work in a solo exhibition at Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai in January 2010. Swati is a
founding member of SAWCC.
Vandana Jain
Town Hall Meeting is a grassroots art history workshop that fosters a open dialogue on contemporary art with the surrounding community. In operation since March 2008, Town Hall's founders, Chris Stiegler and Dina Shaulov are committed to hosting a variety of art experiences throughout New York. Without standardization, continuous structures, or individual authorship, Town Hall engages in a new form of art history - coined as Performative Art History.
Organized by Colleen Asper and Jennifer Dudley, Ad Hoc Vox is an ongoing series of discussions and events without a fixed location that address a wide range of issues in contemporary art.
Shifter is a topical magazine that was founded in 2004 by Sreshta Premnath, who continues to edit the magazine in collaboration with guest editors. Originally concieved as an online magazine in order to create an inter-continential “commons,” Shifter introduced a print version with issue 10. This additional format allowed for an increased approachablity for longer articles as well as additional access to the content for an audience beyond those with high-speed internet.
GRESHAMS GHOST
Gresham's Ghost was conceived by Ajay Kurian as a roving project. Its iterations consistently form and reform its intent and mission. Though golden in color, the grasshopper remains plastic.
PARLOUR
Parlour is a nomadic curatorial project, founded in 2008, that presents weekend-long exhibitions in different homes throughout New York City. Parlour’s impetus is to showcase the work of contemporary artists in a unique and dynamic setting. Beginning in 2010, Parlour will expand is programming to include shows in different cities around the world.
Parlour was conceived by Ciara Gilmartin and Leslie Rosa-Stumpf. Both are graduates of Sarah Lawrence College. Leslie additionally received her MA in Curatorial Studies from Goldsmiths College
MT( Meenakshi Thirukode) is the branded existence of me, an individual. I as a curator and critic will bring forth numerous ideas and contexts within which I will present a chosen number of individuals whose artistic practice I find engaging. This is marketed under the category of ‘Curated Exhibitions’ and is always in collaboration with those who have the means to support my endeavors. ‘Curated exhibitions’ come in various shapes, sizes, styles, all of it driven by my USP- Passion. I am no different than a corporate entity. Corporate structures do not pay heed to the individual, rather it is in negating the individual and creating a mechanism whereby certain pertinent ‘skills’ and ‘ideas’ are made to realize the larger corporate vision. In this case the vision is that of mine. I exist as an individual but function on the principals of Consumerism. I do this as I cannot separate myself from the conditioning of current systems of society, thereby leading to the creation of my Brand Identity. And it’s MT (a play on phonetics that can lead to various interpretations of my intentions and ideas).
As individuals each artist to me presents their own understanding, quests, debates and perhaps projected truth or the idea of the truth as they know it. MT will create a mechanism by which these will work towards realizing a larger vision, a vision that changes with every curated show mostly based on what I fancy is important to contextualize within historical and contemporary frameworks.
