ILA DALMIA FICA RESEARCH GRANT 2013 | SAMUDRA KAJAL SAIKIA

The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) is pleased to announce Samudra Kajal Saikia as the recipient of the Ila Dalmia FICA Research Grant 2013 for his research project titled The Delhi Chapter, Understanding Performance as Art and Beyond: Multiplied Gaze. 

The members of the jury were Yashodhara Dalmia, Shukla Sawant, Roobina Korade and Vidya Shivadas.

Saikia's proposal is for a research and documentation project that engages in historicizing new trends in Performance Art in India. Tracing history and evidences in the last three decades this project addresses some of the most important research queries pertaining to performance art in India, and its new roles in the recent past. The Ila Dalmia FICA Research Grant 2013 will specifically support the first step in his larger research journey, titled The Delhi Chapter. The research will be undertaken in three stages - The first will focus on key concepts such as body, space and spectatorship. The second developmental stage concerns with the artists' selection, selection of groups or agencies and spatial experiences. The third critical stage will be based on captured audio visual documentation and collected archival material.

The jury appreciated Saikia's well rounded approach to his subject, focusing both on documenting contemporary art practices and simultaneously studying these trends in a historical context  through the prisms of methods, concepts and writings. The jury found the research questions that the proposal brought up extremely relevant to today's context where boundaries between various creative practices are being slowly blurred. They also felt that Saikia's own work in the field of performance art gave him an added advantage to engage with his subject more thoroughly and develop methods which draws from outside mainstream art history and documentation.

Samudra Kajal Saikia is a practitioner of interdisciplinary art including performance, public and video art. He is also a poet, researcher and writer. He has a Masters in Visual Art (specialization in Art History) from Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University of Baroda. He is the creative director of Kathputlee Arts and Films, New Delhi. Saikia is also engaged with a self-driven theatrical practice called 'Disposable Theatre'. He is the recipient of the FICA Public Art Grant 2010.