THE AMOL VADEHRA ART GRANT 2017-18 | MALIK SAJAD
The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) is delighted to announce that The Amol Vadehra Art Grant 2017-18 will support the work and research of artist Malik Sajad.
Malik Sajad is a Srinagar-based artist and writer who works often with the format of graphic novels. His proposal was selected by a three member jury – Anupam Poddar, Art Collector and Founder, Devi Art Foundation; Mithu Sen, artist and poet; and Roshini Vadehra, Director, Vadehra Art Gallery.
The Amol Vadehra Art Grant is a production grant and aimed at supporting an Indian artist under the age of 40 years to develop a body of works. The duration of the grant is one year and the funds of Rs 2 lakhs can be used to cover the artist’s direct costs towards creative development and production of a body of artworks.
The Grant will support Malik’s research and production of his proposed visual short story The House. The Jury made note of the clear-cut nature of the proposal and trajectory of Malik’s work. They appreciated his longstanding engagement with the medium of graphic novel and the clarity of the current project which proposes a departure from normative/official political narratives and focuses instead on the stories of people unheard and unnoticed. They were drawn to the foregrounding of different visual languages in his existing body of comic-work and felt it would be fitting to support his process of developing his ongoing visual story.
Blending memory with allegories and legends, the narration in The House centers on stories of resilience and survival by the various protagonists. The Grant will enable Malik to travel in order to observe people on-site and access the intricate details of their lives. The Grant will also support his documentation and exploration of existing fiction and non-fiction, academic, visual and literary material that have explored similar themes. We wish him all the best in bringing this work to fruition and look forward to the project shaping up over the year.
About the recipient:
Malik Sajad is a visual artist and writer. The thematic content of his work revolves around human conditions and the physiological consequences of socio-political uncertainties. Munnu: A Boy From Kashmir, published by HarperCollins, UK, is his first graphic novel, which won the Verve Storyteller Of The Year Award and included as a part of the permanent collection (Artists’Books) at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Malik is an Inlaks Scholar (2011) and OMI, Francis Greenburger Fellow (2013). He studied visual art and storytelling at Kashmir University and Goldsmiths, University of London. Prior to publishing Munnu, Malik wrote several short stories documenting the human toll of political crises across South Asia such as Identity Card, The Posterman, Endangered Species, Facebooked, Gulberg Society Massacre Timeline and Side Effects of Fairness Cream.
Image Courtesy: Malik Sajad, an excerpt from Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir