Emerging Artist Award 2017 | Moonis Ahmad Shah

Initiated in 2007, the FICA Emerging Artist Award, given in collaboration with Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council, seeks to promote young artists studying or practicing in India who demonstrate extraordinary skill and promise in the visual arts. 

The jury consisted of Shukla Sawant, Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU; Vasudha Thozhur, Associate Professor at the Department of Art Design and Performing Arts, Shiv Nadar University; artist Sheila Makhijani; Koonal Duggal, research scholar and currently teaching at the Department of Art History and Art Appreciation, Jamia Millia Islamia University and Vidya Shivadas, Director, FICA. 

With around 300 applications received, the jury appreciated the strength and the diversity of practices and enquiries that young practitioners were exploring: the premise of colonial history, its postcolonial ramifications, gender, issues of interactivity and a strong inclination towards archiving marginal histories were some of the areas of exploration.

After long deliberation, the jury finally awarded Moonis Ahmad Shah the Emerging Artist Award 2017 for his interdisciplinary body of work that uses text, photography, cinema and historical documents, amongst other media, to engage with the issue of representation. Originally, from Srinagar, Ahmad completed his graduation from Beaconhouse National University, Lahore and is currently a Doctoral Candidate at The University of Melbourne.

The archive is an object of interest for Moonis Ahmad Shah. Decentring the notion of institutional history as ‘truth’, he questions its premise, content and form. Through what he thus terms ‘counter archives’, Ahmad intends to use its transgressive potential to reorient staple paradigms around questions of borders, mass migrations, etc. with the aim of overturning the disciplinary power that archives have traditionally exercised in cultural memory. His work explores the space for an ‘anarchic archive’ to imagine an alternative semantics of time and truth that problematises, theorises, questions and challenges one’s normative understanding of contemporaneity. The jury noted his well-conceptualised proposal and was particularly impressed with his sophisticated usage of the wide range of materials in his body of practice. His expertise with technology was appreciated in the light of the archival intent of the project.

As part of the EAA 2017, Ahmad received a ninety-day residency in Switzerland in 2018, supported by Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council, and a chance to showcase his work in a solo exhibition at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi.

2018

Swiss Residency
& Open Studio

ENTER // De-ceasing Relevance: Figuring the Local / s
4 - 5 July, Sattelkammer Bern

Moonis Ahmad Shah's Open Studio at Bern was a culmination of his residency in Switzerland with the support of Pro Helvetia New Delhi - Swiss Arts Council. Titled "De-ceasing Relevance: Figuring the Local/s", the exhibition at Sattelkammer Bern showcased several ongoing projects that Moonis has been developing during his time in Bern.

Moonis continued his exploration of the “archive” in his research based practice. Using various media such as text, software programming, media and historical documents, he examines the materiality and boundaries of the archive. He not only challenges its authority but also argues how the expansive landscape of archive and its technics can be used to create active fields of “discursive” and “non discursive” enquiries into our expanding and multiplying everyday lives and contingent futures of contemporaneity.

View a report on his residency here.

2019

Solo Exhibition
Atlas Holding the Heavens

As part of the Award, Moonis Ahmad Shah had a solo exhibition at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, titled Atlas Holding the Heavens. To view the exhibition click here.

In the exhibition Atlas Holding the Heavens, Shah brings together a new body of work to address diverse questions concerning the everyday, the landscape, the body and how they re-orient, adapt and react to territorial conflicts. It explores various points of departures arising out of these questions and intends to engage with a new kind of anthropology, an immersion in the semantics of systematic creation and association of spectacle with landscape of the borders, margins and conflicts.

Artist Bio

Moonis Ahmad, born in Srinagar, Kashmir is an interdisciplinary artist who works with hybrid practices involving mediums like video, photography, painting, programming and installation.

He has shown his work at various exhibitions nationally and internationally such as his solo show at Rohtas Gallery Lahore in (Dec-Jan) 2016-17;  Group Show “Sleepless Constellations” at 1×1 Gallery, Dubai 2017; Group Show “Past as Present”, at Ghandara Art Space 2017, Group Show “A Million Mutinies Later – India at 70”, at Turner House, Cardiff, UK  and through his participations in “New Wight Biennale”, UCLA, USA as Seh Rang Collective (Sept’16); “Close Together” Borderlines Production, Texas, United States 2014; “Borders and Disorders” Venice Art House 2015. He has also participated in a residential programme “The Shifting Place: Understanding Territorialities: Identity, Place & Possession” at UNIDEE, Cittadelarte 2016, where he was fully funded by EU.

Ahmad was a UNESCO, (United Nations Madanjeet Institute of South Asian Arts) UMISAA scholar at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore and graduated in Fine arts (BFA) with a Gold Medal majoring in Digital Arts.  Ahmad is also a recipient of VCA Access Mentorship Program at the University of Melbourne. Currently, he is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Melbourne and is a recipient of Australian Graduate Research and Training Programme scholarship.