Announcing the Recipient of the Amol Vadehra Art Grant 2018-19 : Shrimanti Saha

The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) is delighted to announce that The Amol Vadehra Art Grant 2018-19 will support the work and research of artist Shrimanti Saha.
 
The three-member jury comprising Anupam Poddar, Art Collector and Founder, Devi Art Foundation; Mithu Sen, artist and poet; and Roshini Vadehra, Director, Vadehra Art Gallery, made special note of the clear-cut nature and trajectory of the project. They felt the need to support a body of work spanning a range of media including hand-made drawings, sculptures as well as animation work. Taking a cue from historical texts, Saha takes inspiration from  literature, mythology, science fiction, philosophy, evolutionary biology and seminal texts on these areas to create works populated with intricate details that reveal new information on closer perusal.

The Amol Vadehra Art Grant is a production grant and is 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 Amol Vadehra Grant will support Shrimanti in crafting a body of work comprising a series of large and small drawings on paper, animation clips and small-scale sculptures, based on contemporary discourses around feminism, capitalism, ecology and their many possible intersections. In her work, temporal plans fuse and what results is an alternative axis that uses already-existing knowledge base and social structures to explore unexplored dimensions. The Grant will enable her to experiment with video-editing software to cultivate her interest in stop-motion animation practices. She intends to push the conventional format of image-making and re-think storytelling through a combination of tactile media with digital interventions to make formally and conceptually complex animation films of longer duration. 

About the recipient: 

Shrimanti Saha completed her BVA and MVA in Painting from Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda. She received the Inlaks Fine Arts Award in 2015 and has been part of residencies at Art Omi in New York; Taj Residency and Ske Project, Bangalore and others. She worked as a freelance illustrator with ad agencies and publishers after her post-graduation; before resuming her practice full time as an artist; and has been part of shows at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi; Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa; Nature Morte, Gurgaon; Gallerie 88, Kolkata; Mumbai Art Room, Mumbai amongst others. Shrimanti is an avid reader, and much of her art is worked out through reading from various sources. Her drawings result in accidental mixtures of characters and environments from different readings / settings, which reflect how she processes information and channels it on paper.