FICA’s Emerging Artist Award, which has previously focused on identifying and supporting an individual artist from India, is now re-envisioned as a collective forum to mentor and engage with a set of 10 young practitioners. As the Emerging Artists Award (EAA+), the platform will carry forward the mentorship and exhibitory aspects of our earlier editions by earmarking workshops and a residency for the selected participants, and developing an exhibition at the end of the grant period.

This year, the EAA+ Jury consisted of curator and researcher Bhooma Padmanabhan, artist and educator Krishnapriya CP, artist Rakhi Peswani, theater director and lighting designer Zuleikha Chaudhuri, artist Asim Waqif and Vidya Shivadas, director, FICA. We received over 400 applications this year and the jury took note of the range of practices shared this year, and responded to the way practitioners were developing their critical enquiries and experiments with a variety of media.

Ankan Dutta is an artist working with site-specific practices. His work explores sculptural forms and motifs stemming from the agrarian landscapes in his immediate environment. He lives and works in Sibsagar, Assam.

Madhukar Mucharla works extensively with issues of caste and anti-caste movements. His practice positions leather-work in an interesting dialogue with tradition and craft. He is based out of Telangana.

Madhurjya Dey is an artist skilfully intertwining narrative storytelling with historical and collective memory across mediums of oil paintings, experimental sculptures, sound design, and Html games. He is currently based out of Goa.

Priyanka D’Souza is an ‘artistorian’ and poet from Mumbai. In her academic and artistic practice, she works with crip time and protest in ecological re-imaginings, Mughal miniatures, early modern Natural History, and explores the concept of the ‘ajai’b’ (wondrous/strange), particularly in imaginings of borderlands of nation-empires, and as applied to anomalous/disabled bodies.

M Thamshangpha’s practice deals with concepts of discrimination together with an idea of self-identification, self-expression and learning roots, positioning socio-cultural and political elements from tribal culture in the contemporary moment. He is based out of Baroda.

Malik Irtiza’s practice traverses various media such as installation, video, text, sound, and sculpture. She works to develop sensitive, speculative vocabularies towards the dimensions of contested territories and associated questions of language, memory, everyday life and history writing. She is based out of Srinagar.

Zeropowercut works with essayistic forms, narrative-poetic momentums, audio-visual imagery, montage, drawing, technology, and various other practices to create temporal experiments in knowing and realising, against the inexpressible reality of Caste. The focus of their research and practice is on how the ideological sanction of Sudra (which translates to ‘menial and unknowledgeable’; as a signification for people and work) manufactures unintelligibility by dissociating the interlinked processes of working, thinking, feeling, and knowing. They are currently based out of Patna.

Surajit Mudi is an interdisciplinary practitioner working with alternative practices of photography within a variety of spaces. He has been exploring the idea of working with performative image-making practices in public spaces, and looks forward to studying the complexity of interactions, mobilities and publics with which alternative practices of image-making engender and converse. He currently lives and works in Santiniketan.

Sandra Thomas addresses the existence, role and influence of consumer culture and its impact upon Kerala society through her experiments with a range of industrial material and studies of the body. She engages creatively with scale, material, site and expression to study the body, its postural ethics and the manner in which the production of bodies-as-objects occupies and consumes space. She is based out of Kottayam, Kerala.

Pahul Singh is a creative practitioner based in Jaipur, Rajasthan. She holds a BFA in Painting from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, and an MVA in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayayjirao University, Baroda. She explores translation, authorship re-authorship, displacements in and around the book and its contemporary. Her practice of book-making vacillates between physical forms and interfaces. She is interested in initiating conversations that ask - What is book-ness? What establishes a book apart from its physical form?