Amol Vadehra Art Grant 2020
Announcing the Recipient | Faiza Hasan
The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) is delighted to announce that the Amol Vadehra Art Grant 2020 has been granted to Faiza Hasan. The grant will further an ongoing project that stems from her interest in objects of personal history, particularly photographs, and their entanglement with the more prominent occurrences of their time.
The jury for the Amol Vadehra Art Grant 2020 consisted of Roshini Vadehra, Director of Vadehra Art Gallery; Tarana Sawhney, Chairperson of the CII task force on Art and Culture; and artist Manisha Parekh. The jury found that Faiza's practice displayed an intricate sensitivity, delving into new kinds of media while experimenting with form and functionality. They felt the proposed project demonstrated great reflexivity in its handling of archives of memory, and incorporated an expansive, rigorous research-oriented approach, adding to the subtlety with which she seeks to address certain urgencies of the moment.
The jury found that Hasan’s practice displayed an intricate sensitivity, delving into new kinds of media while experimenting with form and functionality. They felt the proposed project demonstrated great reflexivity in its handling of archives of memory, and incorporated an expansive, rigorous research-oriented approach, adding to the subtlety with which she seeks to address certain urgencies of the moment.
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 grant will allow Faiza to work closely with a private family archive— its photographs and memoirs— particularly those belonging to women from the generations that preceded her own. Envisioned against the background of the CAA/NRC and its repercussions, the project is driven by an urgency to preserve a sense of the familial through its ephemera - photographs, clippings from print media, objects and letters. Taking shape as an artist’s book, it seeks to house this archive as a testimony and a means of negotiating with several concerns, dwelling on how to establish greater evidence of lived experiences, home and belonging while interrogating the notion of the evidentiary itself. Faiza imagines the book as a smaller repository— not unlike her grandmothers’ sandhuks—drawing from her oeuvre over the years, quietly considering the possibilities of the fragmentary and the forgotten, through drawings, printed photographs, objects and text.
About the recipient:
Faiza Hasan acquired a B.F.A from College of Fine Arts, JNTU, Hyderabad (Gold medal, Painting, 2011; Pervaram Santaji Gold Medal for Painting, 2011). Followed by an M.F.A from the University of Hyderabad (University of Hyderabad Gold Medal, 2014). She participated in the KHOJ International Peers residency in 2015, and was invited by Bordeaux Metropole as an artist-in-residence in 2016. Until 2021, Hasan worked as a programme manager at the Kochi Biennale Foundation, Fort Kochi, where she worked closely with the foundation's education initiatives and programmes. She was also a curator for the Students’ Biennale (Kochi-Muziris Biennale) in 2014 and 2016. Her debut solo show, Dear M, was held at GALLERYSKE, New Delhi, in April, 2021. Hasan lives and works in Hyderabad.
Image credits: Faiza Hasan, Rishi Raj Jain and GALLERYSKE.