Fine Art Awardees 2020: Amrita (Rai) Barua, Ankur Yadav, Devika Sundar, Sandeep TK and Swagata Bhattacharyya
The 2020 Fine Art Awardees are Amrita (Rai) Barua, Ankur Yadav, Devika Sundar, Sandeep TK and Swagata Bhattacharyya. Each of this year’s awardees presents a dynamic practice ranging from graphic art, sculpture, photography, printing and drawing.
This year’s artists were showcased at the India Art Fair 2020.
Amrita (Rai) Barua
Rai’s work explores play cultures, world building and media forms. She has a BFA in Art History from Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan and a M.Des Animation Film Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.
Rai’s current work is situated in the fictional world of a literary play entitled Pulse, where she performs the role of the publisher, Backlogbook. A large part of her practice includes satirical comics, creation of archives, collaboration between practitioners from other domains to create a discursive fictional space. It is to reflect upon the existing, think about possibilities and recover from cultural amnesia.
The works are drawing based and expand into animation, video, sound, sculptures, comics, interactive environments and publication.
Ankur Yadav
Ankur Yadav graduated with a degree in Painting from the Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan and a postgraduate degree in Painting from MSU, Baroda.
He has participated in several exhibitions in the past few years, Abir’s FIRST TAKE, 2019; Young Expression, Pune Biennale, 2017; and QUEST, a groups exhibition organised by the Eastern Zonal Culture Centre, Ministry of Culture, Government of India, 2016 to name a few.
For the past couple of years he has created a diverse body of works. His most recent works are partially an outcome of readings which criticise the science of museums and the formulaic way in which audiences engage with it. Through his practice he transforms studio spaces into museum like spaces using chaos, disorder and rupture as a strategy His practice relies on instinct, spontaneity and disorder, to give a sense of disaster produced by the knowledge it generates.
Devika Sundar
Devika Sundar is a contemporary artist based in Bangalore. Her practice shifts across different media, combining material elements of collage, painting, and printmaking with photography and installation. Drawn toward the silent, indefinable, incommunicable qualities of human experience, Devika expresses in her work a shared and complex, ambiguity of being; exploring transitory human states that aren’t searching or reaching towards conclusion, finality or end narrative. Exploring art as a narrative medium of human connection; she expresses collective themes of invisibility, illness, memory and impermanence within personal and shared human experience. Devika has exhibited in solo shows at Gallery Sumukha and Alliance Francaise, Bangalore. She has also presented her project “Essentially Normal Studies” around invisible illnesses, as a keynote speaker at MYOPAIN 2018, an international medical conference organized by the Indian MYOPAIN Society – a chapter of the International Myopain Society.
Devika founded and facilitates Hanno Terrace studio - A therapeutic and collective art space / open studio, facilitate art as an accessible, inclusive and dialogical form of therapeutic healing and outlet for children and adults from different ages / backgrounds. She runs weekly, individual studio sessions and monthly community-based group workshops through the year. Seeking to challenge exclusivity with art circles, the workshops conceptualise safe silent spaces for expression, release and shared communication, exploring art as a unifying language.
Devika studied Anthropology, Art history and Visual arts in Sarah Lawrence College, New York and graduated with a Commendation in Contemporary Art Practice at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
Sandeep TK
Sandeep TK’s practice involves documentary photography, moving images, text and fictional narratives that involve himself. He is interested in the complexity of human relationships which he explores through his identity, personal experiences and surroundings.
He has participated in the Sher-Gil Sundaram 1Shanthiroad Studio/Gallery emerging artist residency in 2015. In 2016 he created a public art project ‘Connecting Roots’ where he documented the journey of jasmine flowers to KR Market from Krishnagiri, Tamilnadu. The photographs were then exhibited at the Bangalore flower market.
He was an artist in resident in Lichtenberg Studios, Berlin supported by Bangalore-Residency and the Goethe institute, Max Muller Bhavan in 2017. In 2018 He had his first solo exhibition of photography and video ‘Singularity’ at Gallery Sumukha, Bangalore. He exhibited his work as part of 2019 KG+ Kyotography International Photo Festival, Japan.
Originally from Thalassery, Kerala, the artist currently lives and works in Bangalore.
Swagata Bhattacharyya
Swagata Bhattacharyya is currently pursuing a master’s degree in painting from M.S.U Baroda. He previously obtained a BFA in Painting from the Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata.
Brought up in North 24 Parganas of West Bengal his move to a metropolis for his under-graduate studies invoked an interest in the urban spaces he inhabited. He viewed them from a great distance coupled with a desire to belong. The city as a diagram, as a premeditated design charted out in graphite and pen drawings, became a way to negotiate with his relationship with the urban.
The areas of Baranagar in Kolkata with its perpetual ‘development’ invoked his focus on sites of construction and erasure. Such initiatory works gained him the Faber Castell Certification of Excellence in Painting in 2018.
Since then he has ventured into inquiries that involve the structures, myths and fault lines of urban design and contemporary society explored through media beyond drawing, such as video, photography, and building three dimensional models of a city.
