Fine Art Awardees 2021: Anisha Baid, Gurjeet Singh, Maksud Ali Mondal, Salman Bashir Baba and Savyasachi Anju Prabir
The Fine Art Awardees for 2021 are, Anisha Baid, Gurjeet Singh, Maksud Ali Mondal, Salman Bashir Baba and Savyasachi Anju Prabir. The five awardees see the world through kaleidoscope lenses, each with a unique perspective, approach and response to the world around them.
Read more about them and their respective practices below.
Anisha Baid
Anisha Baid is an artist and writer from Kolkata, India. Through her practice and research, she is investigating the intersection of computer interfaces, corporate culture, and gendered labour. She works with found and archival material – often sourced from the internet to construct narratives that move between fiction and documentary. Having grown up on the personal computer, her inquiry is focused on the interface as the medium for human-computer interaction. Her work attempts to poke at the flat-scapes of the computer screen to decode computer labour through the interface - a technological tool that has converted most spaces of work into image space. She has been researching and working with Text-to-Speech, machine generated voices as well as investigating the phenomenon of talking computers. Most recently, she has been invested in understanding digital image cultures through the lens of photography and works extensively with appropriated stock images and commercial imagery image culture.
She has participated in various exhibitions including Mind over Matter (2020) at Technical Collections in Dresden, Germany, View India (2019) at the Landskrona Foto Museum in Sweden, and Future Foundations(2019) at Walkin Studios in Bangalore. She has participated in the SSAF Next Step Residency (2018) and received Women and Intersectionality(2019) Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council as well as BanagloResidency expanded(2020) grant from the Goethe Institut Bangalore. Anisha has studied media art at Srishti Institute of Art in Bangalore, worked as assistant curator at Serendipity Arts Festival (2019), and currently works in the editorial team at PIX Quarterly, a journal of South Asian photography.
Gurjeet Singh
Gurjeet Singh’s interest in art was developed at home with his family. They have always been engrossed in creative activities and encouraged him to pursue innovative ways of expressing himself. From the women in his home he learnt a variety of skills, such as stitching, embroidery or decorating the house. From his father who repairs scooters and deals in their spare parts he understood how machines work.
Gurjeet primarily creates sculptures, painting, drawings and installations. Through his practice he addresses the several issues that plague the LGBTQ community. He aims to highlight the stories and truths that are often hidden or swept away for being inconvenient.
He graduated with BFA and MFA, as a gold medalist, from Government College of Art, Chandigarh. Since then, he has attended residencies at KHOJ, New Delhi and Space Studio, Baroda. He has won many awards such as 30 Under 30 by the Hindustan Times and Punjab Lalit Kala Academy. Moreover, he has received many grants such as the travelling grant for Kochi Muziris Biennale, KHOJ Support Grant and Shrishti AIF Grant, Hyderabad.
Gurjeet was born in Punjab and is currently based in Chandigarh
Maksud Ali Mondal
Maksud Ali Mondal was born in Bankura, West Bengal. He completed his BFA and MFA from the Department of Painting at Kala- Bhavana, Santiniketan in 2019. In 2016, he attended a semester at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, Netherlands.
Maksud’s practice is an exploration of biological and feral life in the current environment. His recent works are critically and creatively survey the ecological debates and crisis that surround us today.
His site-specific installation "Nature Unconditioned”, received the international award at the Kochi- Muziris Students' Biennale, 2019. In 2018, he received the national scholarship from the Ministry of Culture, The Government of India and participated in an international residency supported by Feudo Maccari, Sicily, Italy. His work was exhibited at Serendipity Arts Festival, 2019 in collaboration with Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art. He has showcased his talents in numerous group exhibitions across India.
Maksud currently lives and works in Santiniketan.
Salman Bashir Baba
Salman Bashir Baba is an interdisciplinary artist from Kashmir. His practice explores the concepts of memory, identity, conflict and power. Through his work he ponders over the liminal spaces that exist between, being and nonbeing, life and death in conflict ridden zones. He is interested in understanding the possibilities of human life in these liminal spaces. While he primarily creates drawings and installations, his also employs a variety of media and materials, such as coding, performance, sculpture, embroidery on shroud, found audio, video footages, photographs, drawn maps, scent, etc. in his performances and installations.
Salman recently completed his MA in Visual Arts from Ambedkar University, New Delhi and BA in Applied Arts from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He has participated in various art workshops and events. He has recently organised a workshop cum interaction programme for young artists with Yusmarg Collective in Kashmir.
Savyasachi Anju Prabir
Savyasachi Anju Prabir has a BA in Film and Contemporary Arts from Srishti Institutte of Art, Design and Techonology, Bengaluru. In 2021, he will obtain his MA in Visual Anthropology from University of Muenster, Germany. Due to the recent pandemic the university was forced to delay his class’ graduation by a semester.
Savyasachi’s interest as an artist, particularly filmmaking, began with him documenting lives he believed to be interesting and needed to be remembered. Since then his interests have evolved, and his practice now explores co-production and collaboration in order to raise questions on representation and identity through a multimodal and postcolonial approach.
He is currently working on an auto-ethnographic film project with his grandmother to re-create his childhood home and rediscover his sense of identity and belonging. Although she believes the camera makes her conscious and “one can’t see reality”, Savyasachi believes that the film offers glimpses into her reality. It is at this threshold of real and unreal that time, memories, dreams and the effects they play on relationships are redefined. Together, his grandmother and he are looking for a new lens through which they can look at their past in ways that inform our future and create new spaces for everyone to do so. They wish to reinterpret the meaning of ‘home’ through an exchange of images and the making of this film.
