Mario Sundeep D’Souza
Mario dsouza, artist living in between paris and india, working on the concept of home away from home,
The body of works created talk about the discovery of space and how to formalize this space as a space of work of art, living space , historical space, present space and most of all a space of celebration !
The idea of creating installations , to walk into, relive, understand and give rise to a high breed and this context ,helps to build a bridge in between cultures.
Born in india in 1973 and living in france and india
Avantika Bawa
Avantika Bawa lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Originally from New Delhi, India, she received an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in the same from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, India.
She has participated in the Skowhegan, Ucross Foundation, MacDowell, Kochi Biennial Foundation, Yucca Valley Material Lab, and Djerassi residencies among others. Noteworthy solo exhibits include shows at The Portland Art Museum, OR, Schneider Museum, Ashland, OR, Suyama Space, Seattle, WA, The Columbus Museum, GA; Saltworks Gallery and the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Atlanta, GA; Nature Morte and Gallery Maskara in India; White Box, Tilt Gallery & Project Space and Disjecta, Portland, OR.
Bawa is the recipient of several awards, notably the Oregon Arts Commission Joan Shipley Award, the Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts 2018 Golden Spot Residency Award, and the Hallie Ford Fellowship presented by the Ford Family Foundation. In April 2004 she was part of a team that launched Drain – Journal for Contemporary Art and Culture. http://www.drainmag.com.
In 2014 Avantika was appointed to the board of the Oregon Arts Commission. She is currently Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Washington State University, Vancouver, WA.
Ranjit Kandalgaonkar
Ranjit Kandalgaonkar lives and works in Mumbai and his art practice primarily comprises a lens directed at the urban context of cities. Projects such as ‘cityinflux’, ‘Gentricity’, ‘build/browse’ and ‘Stories of Philanthropic Trusts’ map vulnerability within redevelopment strategies of urbanisation or record timelines and ‘blindspots’ – alternate markers of a city that’s unraveling. A study of combative histories of reclamation and speculation have led to projects such as ‘Isles amidst reclamation’ and ‘Seven Isles unclaimed’. Another decade-long project recording ship-breaking practices at Alang,Gujarat have led to the exhibitions ‘Shipping & the Shipped’ – showcased at the Bergen Assembly, Art & Research Triennial,2016, ‘Sea Change’- Colomboscope Biennale, 2019 and ‘The Stonebreakers’ at Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi in 2020.
Awards & grants include Majlis Visual Arts Fellowship ,UDRI Fellowship, Leverhulme Artist Residency , Harvard University SAI Artist Residency , Atelier Prati Print Residency, Seed Funding Award -Wellcome Trust and a Gasworks/Wellcome Collection Artist Residency collaboration for which he produced an interactive drawing depicting his research on the Bombay plague of 1896.
Samanta Batra Mehta
Samanta Batra Mehta often works with altered images and intricate mark-making. Her practice revolves around the notion of identity and space, where the idea of Samanta Batra Mehta’s work has been exhibited in the US and abroad including at the Queens Museum of the Arts, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and Aicon Gallery in New York, the Hunterdon Museum and the Visual Arts Center in New Jersey, the Taubman Museum of Art in Virgina, and Fondazione Fotografia Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, Italy, among others. Galerie LMD, Paris showcased her 24 foot long site-specific mural at the Salon Du Dessin Contemporain, at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris. Her work was included in the ‘Reading Room’, a Partner Exhibition at the 2014 Kochi Biennale. Apart from gallery shows, Samanta’s work has been showcased at Art Stage, Singapore, India Art Fair, Bologna Arte Fiere , Art Basel Hong Kong and Art Dubai. Her first solo, ’Cabinet of Curiosities’, with Shrine Empire, New Delhi in was nominated for the Forbes India Art Award in the ‘Best Debut Solo’ category in 2014. She was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s 2015 Painters & Sculptors Grant Award and the Wave Hill’s 2020 Winter Workspace Residency in New York. Her works are included in private and public collections including at Fondazione Fotografia Cassa di Risparmio di Modena in Italy, the RPG Group, The Jindal Collection, the Birla Art Foundation, India among others.
Tarla Patel
Tarla Patel is a Contemporary visual artist based in Coventry, Tarla’s work explores identity, memory and space through migration and storytelling. Patel is the legacy holder of her father’s photography, the Masterji archive: documenting South Asian community from 1950s to 2000. Co-published Masterji book (2017).
Her work combines lens-based media to create visual narratives. She has worked on several projects with artists, academics, communities, and arts organisations and public participatory projects in UK and overseas.
Tarla is an orator of her father’s photography and the importance of representation in the arts, this talk was for Black Country Visual Arts in April 2021
She is an International Digital Changemaker working alongside contemporary artist Saba Zahid in Pakistan. This project is focuses on women in Coventry, UK and Lahore, Pakistan. This project is supported by Coventry City of Culture and the British Council until 2022.
Patel’s work has been published spring 2021, as part of an online international call out ‘Postcards of the Pandemic‘, a multi-disciplinary project that is part of a series of international workshops in the US, Greece and Germany.
Emma Critchley
Emma Critchley is an artist who uses a combination of photography, film, sound and installation to continually explore the human relationship with the underwater environment as a political, philosophical and environmental space. She is Royal College of Art alumni and has developed works funded by organisations including The National Media Museum, Arts Council England, British Council, Singapore International Foundation, British Academy and the European Regional Development Fund. Her work has been shown extensively nationally and internationally in galleries and institutions including The Australian Centre of Photography, the ICA Singapore, The National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Tate St Ives.
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