Emerging Artists Award (EAA+) 2024 Recipients

This year, we are thrilled to be supporting the stellar practices and pursuits of artists Ashis Dhali, Ashis Kumar Palei, Bhikari Pradhan, Kiran Mungekar, Partha Banik, Rahee Punyashloka, Richa Arya, Ritika Sharma, Soumava Das, and Vipin Dhanurdharan, through the aegis of EAA+.

Our esteemed jury consisted of artists Rakhi Peswani, Jeebesh Bagchi, Varunika Saraf and Susanta Mandal as well as curator and researcher Bhooma Padmanabhan as the MMF representative, along with Vidya Shivadas, director at FICA.

We received over 350 applications this year, showcasing a remarkable diversity of practices, critical inquiries, and experimental approaches across a wide range of disciplines and genres in art. The jury, in their reflections, took time to consider how artistic practices today intersect across mediums, contexts, and collaborative formats. As part of the jury process, they closely examined how the selected cohort could actively engage with the EAA+ platform, acknowledging the marginalities and fissures that can dialogue and intersect in multiple ways. The jury also considered the contingencies shaping our present moment and how these are being addressed and highlighted within the scope of contemporary art. This cohort brings together varied strengths, narratives, and contexts from across the country, and the EAA+ platform looks forward to exploring the possibilities these connections may inspire, fostering exchanges among people and practices while recognizing their shared, synergistic, and divergent elements.

We wish our grantees all the very best for their endeavours, and look forward to an exciting year ahead with them!

Glimpses from the EAA+ 2024 Residency

The EAA+ 2024 cohort attended a workshop and fellows’ meet at the SSAF Kasauli Art Project (SKAP) in Himachal Pradesh, accompanied by mentor BV Suresh. The environs of SKAP (and Kasauli) offered each person—pause as well as provocation, reflection alongside spontaneous activation.

The workshop, loosely structured across variable formats of sharing and dialogue, allowed participants to reflect on what it means to closely read one another’s work within a peer network in progress. It opened up ways to examine key enquiries across practices, the urgencies of the contemporary moment, and the individual and shared preoccupations shaping artistic vocabularies today. The sessions, spread over ten days, included informal sharings, presentations, screenings, and peer-led exercises that explored specific medium-led enquiries, personal and professional proclivities, and future imaginings. As mentor and discussant, Suresh encouraged participants to ideate not just with each other, but also with themselves and with their inhabitation of Kasauli. He encouraged a daily evening convergence over tea, shaped by each participant around what they carried with them: preoccupations, previous works, unfinished and incomplete projects, and what they were collecting in the moment—leaves, food, sunsets, insect bites, annotations, ways of reading, the concavity of the mountainside, bird sound escalations, staggering slopes, and the traces of the things we consumed and those that consumed us. Thinking together about ‘simple acts’ and the possibilities they hold, each participant presented a distillation of their time at SKAP through an exercise, display, or performance. These included a range of concepts such as monumentality, sentiment, surveillance, assimilation, specificity, spatial negotiation, materiality and domesticity, experimentation, and invention.

We are deeply grateful to SKAP for their support with this residency. For all participants, it became a critical moment to reconsider the vantage points we wish to scale as artists, creators, and institutions, and how these can help not just in producing more, but in reflecting deeply on what we make, and where that act of making rests.

Overview of the exhibition

The grant showcase is a critical part of the EAA+ programme that builds engagement with young artists within a peer-led model of dialogue, exchange, mentorship and making. As the cumulative point of the forum, the exhibition serves as a space to gather all of the explorations, convergences and relationalities that have emerged from the shared cohort experience into a collaborative, collective articulation.

The exhibition, titled towards minor gestures: intensities in the making was on view at Vadehra Art Gallery from 8 July - 7 August, 2026. It brought together the distinguished practices of our EAA+ 2024 grantees Ashis Dhali, Ashis Kumar Palei, Bhikari Pradhan, Kiran Mungekar, Rahee Punyashloka, Richa Arya, Ritika Sharma, Partha Banik, Soumava Das and Vipin Dhanurdharan.

The works within this exhibition span engagements with various registers of image-making and image encounters, different forms of space-making, research and documentation-based outcomes, as well as discursive, participatory encounters. The exhibition was presented alongside active programming through a variety of artist interventions, workshops, and dialogues.

To explore the full exhibition, click here.

About our partners

The Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation (MMF) was established in December 2015 in accordance with the vision of the artist Mrinalini Mukherjee, to carry forth the legacy of the Mukherjee family which include her parents, the critically acclaimed modernist Benode Behari Mukherjee and artist-educator Leela Mukherjee. While the Foundation's primary aim is to preserve and promote the legacy of this unique family through exhibitions, archiving, research initiatives, publications and films, it will fulfill its charitable purposes by extending its resources to art practitioners, students, educators, and art institutions through its various grant-making and collaborative initiatives. In the long term the Foundation looks to encourage and augment a range of programmes, practices and processes to sustain and nurture Indian art in the country and on the international stage.

Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (SSAF) was established in 2016 with the mandate to carry forward the legacy of scholar and photographer, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil (1870–1954); his daughter and a pioneering figure of modern Indian art, Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941); her nephew and niece, artist Vivan Sundaram and filmmaker and television journalist, Navina Sundaram. SSAF seeks to enable conjunctions of artistic and cultural practice that deal with historical memory, and to build expectations for the future. It commits itself to advancing creative independence for art that is founded on freedom of expression, and which is secular. It is committed to working in solidarity with initiatives addressing concerns of the marginalized; and supporting alternative and heterodox practices.