Emerging Artist Award 2019 | Dharmendra Prasad
The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) is pleased to announce that the Recipient of Emerging Artist Award (EAA) 2019 is Dharmendra Prasad. This Award is granted annually in collaboration with Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, and seeks to promote young artists who are studying or practising in India, and demonstrate extraordinary skill and promise in the visual arts.
The EAA Jury 2019 consisted of artist Benitha Perciyal; artist Rohini Devasher; Akshay Pathak, Head of Pro Helvetia New Delhi; and Vidya Shivadas, Director, FICA. With over 300 applications received this year, the process went through an initial shortlisting which were then passed on to the jury for examination. The jury gave unanimous feedback on the strong applications received this year, and the range of practices they encountered which spoke of diverse and deep enquiries. After a day-long discussion through careful deliberation through their individual shortlists of candidates, they came to the decision of presenting the grant to Dharmendra Prasad.
Dharmendra Prasad is an artist based in Guwahati, with a practice spanning across mediums of installation, video, painting, photography, performance. Dharmendra’s practice takes the Harvest as a ‘philosophical take-off’, where his artistic intention lies in cultivating and re-configuring understandings around Agrarian practices, rural memory and knowledge, and in extension, the ecologies that foreground and inform the dividing ‘digital/ technological psyche’. The accumulation of meaning in this rich metaphor is also evident in his use of hay and other forms of ‘harvest material/ waste’ as recurring material and medium. There is a running engagement with indigenous knowledge systems and farming practices, bringing a solid grounding to his artistic practice.
The jury felt that this is the right stage in Dharmendra’s artistic career to be receiving this award. They were appreciative of the language he is developing - addressing a layered history with material source from the field, which lays out a deep relationship with environmental and agrarian politics of the colonial past and post-colonial, techno-liberal present. The ambit of this material preoccupation runs deep through Dharmendra’s practice, gesturing towards a process of accumulation, collection, and a kind of revitalisation through artistic creation.
As part of the EAA 2019, Dharmendra will also get a chance to showcase his work as part of the FICA Homepage platform amidst other FICA grantees in 2021. FICA is grateful to the support offered by Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, for hosting the solo exhibition.
We wish Dharmendra all the very best.
Home Not Alone Residency Update
FICA is pleased to announce that Emerging Artist Awardee 2019, Dharmendra Prasad, began his residency on 1st September 2020, with the support of Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council.
Following reflections with Pro Helvetia offices across the world, the residencies involving travel have been replaced with a project called the ‘Home Not Alone’ residencies. Here, artists across the world, including Dharmendra Prasad, aim to realise projects while “staying at home”.
Dharmendra’s proposed project ‘Carebiosphere’ is germinating between Buxar and Switzerland, while he remotely works with mentors and other like-minded artists and residents, to take his research forward. In the current phase of ‘Carebiosphere’, Dharmendra looks to remotely examine pre-industrial Swiss agrarian practices alongside those in Buxar, that inform philosophies around living, being, and art, where he looks to harness these methodologies to aiding the crises of the present. He sees ecologies of care that can be developed through philosophies and knowledge systems that are based in traditional agrarian practices. He seeks to think alongside non-human species as sustainable partners.
With Tara Lasrado as his mentor, Dharmendra was working on initiating his project of Carebiosphere during the Home Not Alone Residency, that through the process functioned as a space situated between the online and offline. Dharmendra mentioned that sometimes things were more powerful in the field and sometimes more online, and oftentimes there wasn’t a plan or particular enquiry in the development of this project. Through an ongoing engagement with the field in Bihar, where he was situated physically as well as conversations that took place over the Residency period, organised with transdisciplinary artists, farmers, and more, the series of events that took place seems to take on a lifelong project with the particularities of harvest cycles and sustained development.
Residency Open Day
How to Do Nothing, A Workshop
Rolling through orality, toil, winds, dimensions, horizon and deteriorating seasons, Dharmendra Prasad harvests imagination, memories, times, change and toil, that are stored as residue in the backyard of life’s goal. Born in-between stories, discrimination, hierarchies, chaos and silence, full of winds and dusts, without any address Dharmendra practices between the fields of Gangetic plains to the villages, waterbodies and rainforests of northeast India.
Dharmendra is currently collaborating with Tara Lasrado on «carebiosphere», a new work on landscapes of care and notions of community rooted across India, Switzerland and beyond, initiated during the “Home Not Alone” residency organised by Pro Helvetia New Delhi.
Tara and Dharmendra met at under the mango tree, a self-organised gathering of “unlearning” that took place in Shantiniketan, India in February 2020 and focused on land-based learning, rural and performance practices that address our relationship to the individual and collective body.
Dharmendra and Tara have developed a workshop on how to do nothing in collaboration with Do Nothing Curating. The participants will experiment with doing nothing, toiling, and waiting – a continuation in practices of locality that lay ground to Dharmendra’s artistic work.
The workshop took place at online at the School of Common Zoom Lunchtable Room.
Carebiosphere 2020
The Roving Archive
Roving archive is a mobility situation and the title of the mobile structure (a deep care vehicle inspired from multiple situations of mobility in agriculture and forms of insects and agrarian tools like soil worms, locusts and tractors). Roving archive will work as a deep care vehicle to harvest and generate deep care situations and stories from the fields. The vehicle will move to the fields, harvest sites, under the trees, and all kinds of rural occupational sites immersed in occupational situations to begin informal conversations around ecology, time, rurality, food, culture, education etc.
About the Artist
Dharmendra Prasad is an artist based in Guwahati. He has a BFA in Painting from Govt. College of Arts and Crafts, Guwahati. He also did his MFA in Painting from the SN School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad. He has been part of Artist Residencies such as Khoj PEERS (2018); Pepper House Art Residency, Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018); and Dharti Arts Residency, Serendipity Arts Foundation, New Delhi (2019). Dharmendra has recently exhibited his work at A-Part: Stories of Lands & Lines (2019); Pepper House Residency Exhibition as part of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018-19; CIMA Award Exhibition (2019); Collection Bureau: A Pollinator Project at India Art Fair 2018. He has also shown his work previously at Harmony at Easel Art Gallery, Guwahati (2013); CONFLUENCE at Anga Art Collective, Guwahati (2012). His work also includes durational and collective projects.
In collaboration with the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
Image Credits: Dharmendra Prasad
Cover Image details: Residualities (Harvest SIte), Dharmendra Prasad, Fort Kochi, 2018-19