facilitators

Sanchayan Ghosh received his Masters in Fine Arts from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan in 1997 and currently works as an Associate Professor, Department of Painting, Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan. Over the years, Sanchayan has been interested in site-specific art and has done extensive work in space designing for experimental and contemporary theatre. With his inspirations from community ritual events and pedagogic practice in Santiniketan and his workshop experience with Third theatre exponent Badal Sarkar he involves pedagogy as practice where he generates collective process of working and learning through workshops process that is interactive and participatory. He re-engages with the notion of study from a multifaceted reciprocal conversation to emerge interdisciplinary crossover of multiple practices and generate critical dialogue around land, landscape transformation, labour and practice.

Sanchayan has offered many workshops to students of different institutions all over India and has most recently been part of the six-member curatorial team of Students’ Biennale 2018 in Kochi, held parallel with Kochi Muziris Biennale 2018. He has also participated and conducted a workshop in the Documenta 14, Gathering Under the Mango Tree - Sites of Learning, 2017.

Dr. Sarada Natarajan

Dr. Sarada Natarajan is an art historian, illustrator, and wildlife enthusiast. She taught art history and theory at various institutions in India for fourteen years, including the University of Hyderabad, Shiv Nadar University, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, and Ashoka University. She is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Art History and the Arts at Krea University, Sri City. Sarada completed her doctorate in art history from the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Vadodara and did a stint as Postdoctoral Fellow of Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices at the Humboldt University, Berlin, from 2016 to 2017. She has mentored young curators and artists for three successive Students’ Biennales at Kochi. A trained Carnatic vocalist, Sarada experiments with music and movement for theatre and illustrates for children.

Vidya Shivadas | Director, FICA

Annalisa Mansukhani | Programme Facilitator

Vidya Shivadas is a curator based in New Delhi. She completed her Masters in Art Criticism from Faculty of Fine Arts, M S University, Vadodara in 2000. She worked for more than a decade at the Vadehra Art Gallery before taking on the role of FICA Director in 2011. She has curated a number of exhibitions at the Vadehra Art Gallery since 2002 as well as guest curated exhibitions at Devi Art Foundation, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Edinburgh Art Festival and Serendipity Arts Festival. In 2007, she was invited to participate in the educational programming for Documenta 12 from May to September 2007 in Kassel, Germany. In 2009, she received the Asian Art Archive’s Research Grant for her research on the development of art critics in India from post-independence period to the present day. In 2018 she participated in a curatorial residency programme offered by the Kunstsammlung NRW, Dusseldorf in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut.

Shivadas is Visiting Faculty at School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi since 2013 as well as faculty for the Post Graduate Diploma in Modern & Contemporary Indian Art & Curatorial Studies at Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai between 2013 and 2017.

Annalisa Mansukhani is a writer, researcher and curator studying histories of photography and notions of the archive in contemporary art and curatorial practices. She read history for her undergraduate degree from St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, and has a Master’s in art history from Nalanda University. She has previously worked at the Kochi Biennale Foundation, and is one of the recipients of the first Critical Collective-PhotoSouthAsia Young Writer's Award for lens-based practices.

Annalisa is a contributing writer for ASAP | art where she dissects possibilities of the photographic in contemporary inter-media practices. As the Programmes Manager for the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) in Delhi, she establishes frameworks and activates resources around art and education, spaces of exhibition, research, and public programming. Writing alongside image and verse, she is currently fascinated by evolving vocabularies of imaging trauma and violence across mediums in art.

Stuti Bhavsar | Research Coordinator

Stuti Bhavsar did her graduation in Painting from M.S University, Baroda in 2019, and Post-Graduation in Visual Arts from Ambedkar University, Delhi in 2021. As a part of Agriforum, she works towards building a repository of reference materials for the forum, supporting the process of coordinating with resource persons, and building, maintaining the Agriforum website and blog. She works as a Programmes Coordinator for Reliable Copy, Bangalore – an independent publishing house dedicated to the realisation and circulation of works, projects, and writing by artists.

As a visual practitioner, she is interested in seeing how time and labor manifest periodically, physiologically, and the manner in which sediments and traces fold over in due course of time. One of her primary engagements have been to understand light as a vector in its various forms and intensities, and see its long-term effect on bodily sensorium and perception.

Randeep Maddoke is a Photographer and Documentary Filmmaker currently teaching as Assistant Professor in Photography at Lovely Professional University, Punjab. He has done regular photojournalistic and freelance assignments for magazines and newspapers, such as, Haryana Review, Tehelka, The Times of India, Frontline, Indo-US Dialogue Magazine, etc. He has participated in various photography workshops, namely, “Aesthetics in photography” taught by the world renowned photographer Morten Krogvold in Kathmandu (Nepal), 2013. In 2014 and 2009, he held solo exhibitions titled Sculpted Moments and Chandigarh Through My Heart at Alliance Française de Chandigarh.

Randeep’s feature length documentary film Landless was premiered at the 6th Udaipur Film Festival in Udaipur (Rajastan). It has been selected for screening for film festivals like the 6th Kolkata People’s Film Festival (KPFF), organised by the People’s Film Collective, Kolkata (West Bengal) in January 2019; the 6th Gorakhpur Film Festival organised by the Cinema of Resistance, Gorakhpur (Uttar Pradesh) in January 2019; and the 2ndNagpur Film Festival organized by Cinema of Resistance, Nagpur (Maharashtra) in March 2019. Through his work Randeep has also consistently engaged in photographing several social and political issues in Nepal since 2008. He has done detailed research and photography of Maoist movement and aftermath of earthquake (2015) in Nepal.

Sopan Joshi is a journalist and author in New Delhi. For about 25 years he has researched, written and edited for a variety of publications, in English and Hindi. His journalism is driven by social values and a desire to better understand his people, his society, his environment. His framework draws from both the indigenous values of India’s freedom struggle and the best of modern science and environmental research. He has consistently reported, written and spoken about farmers and agriculture, forestry and water management, indigenous peoples and societies. He also writes intermittently on adventure and travel, sports and motoring, religion and politics, having worked as a full-time travel writer and political correspondent. He has travelled across India and the world on assignment and worked in the US on a sabbatical in 2008.

He has written three non-fiction books in Hindi. The first, titled 'Jal-Thal-Mal' (‘Water-Land-Excreta’; 2016), is a product of 10 years of research on the history and science of sanitation, seen with a social and environmental perspective. Its three Hindi editions were published over the subsequent three years. A Marathi translation was released in 2018 and a Punjabi and Gujarati translation is readying for release. His second book, titled 'Ek Tha Mohan' (‘A boy called Mohan’, 2017), is a contemporary introduction of Mahatma Gandhi’s life and work for teenagers and young adults. His third book, 'Bapu Ki Pati' (‘Bapu’s Message’, 2018), introduces young children to the values of Mahatma Gandhi, relying on the formats of the graphic novel and children's stories, but based entirely on rigorous research into Mahatma Gandhi's life. Several editions of both the books have been released, both by state governments and other publishers.

Namita Waikar is a writer and translator. She is the author of the novel The Long March. She is the managing editor of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) and writes for and anchors the Grindmill Songs Project. At present she is working on a non-fiction book on the farmers’ protests forthcoming with Melbourne University Publishing. She is also a partner in a chemistry databases firm in Pune, which is the culmination of her work of over 20 years as a biochemist and a software project manager.

Daniel Langthasa is a 38 year old artist and politician based in Haflong, a hill station in Dima Hasao, an autonomous district of Assam in North East India. Daniel was an engineering student when his father was killed by extremists in 2007. He gave up engineering after the incident and started writing music with an aim to discourage young people from joining extremist groups. He writes music solo as Mr.India and is part of a band named Digital Suicide.
He joined active politics in 2018 and is currently an elected member from Haflong in the autonomous council of Dima Hasao district.

S.P Ravi is the Director(Administration) of the River Research Centre (RRC), a non-profit public charitable and scientific trust that works towards the conservation of rivers and forests, and environment in India.

The RRC has been working to create a space for studies on rivers, interactions with river basin people, river dependent departments, local self governments, government and other concerned entities towards participatory and decentralized river basin conservation, rejuvenation and management. They have been engaged in working towards improving the existing forest and environmental governance system in Kerala and at the Central Government level. As the Director (Administration), S.P Ravi has been involved in the river basin since 1990.

Ravi Agarwal has a long standing inter-disciplinary practice as a photographer/ artist, environmental campaigner, writer and curator. Bridging the divide between art and activism he addresses the entangled questions of nature and its futures using photography, video, text and installation. His work ranges from the long documentary to the conceptual and performative and he has regularly published photobooks and diaries (Ambient Seas — 2016, Extinct? — 2009, Immersion. Emergence — 2006). The book Down and Out (OUP 2002) was a first major photographic work on migrant labour in India. His work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (2021) and at the Biennials of Havana (2019), Yinchuan (2018), Kochi (2016), Sharjah (2013), Indian Highway (2009), Documenta XI etc. besides solos and group exhibitions. He has curated large Indo- European public art projects (Yamuna-Elbe — twin city project — 2011, and Embrace our Rivers — 2018), and was photography curator for the Serendipity Arts Festival 2018 and 2019. He is the curator for the forthcoming exhibition New Natures; A terrible beauty is born, to be held by the Goethe Institute Mumbai, in January 2022. He is currently working on a new photobook and a multispecies art project Samtal Jameen, Samtal Jameer supported by the Prince Claus Foundation.

Ravi has served on several important art and photography juries and has initiated an arts and ecology program to support emerging practitioners. His work is in several private and public collections, he has edited books (The Crisis of Climate Change, Routledge, 2021; Embrace Our Rivers – Kerber, 2017), journals (Marg- Art and Ecology issue – April 2020, IIC journal Spring 2020), and writes and publishes regularly on art and sustainability (Alien Waters in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, 2021). Alongside, he is the founder director of the leading environmental NGO Toxics Link and has been the recipient of the UN-IFCS Award for Chemical Safety, as well as the Ashoka Fellowship.