The 2024 Inlaks Fine Art Awardees
Sewali Deka, Surajit Mudi, Anup Let, Jit Natta and Mothe Mahesh
are the Inlaks Fine Art Awardees for 2024.
Last week, we featured Anup, Jit and Mahesh, and discovered more
about their thought process and work.
Today, meet Sewali and Surajit, the other two awardees for this year,
and learn more about their pursuits.
Sewali Deka
Sewali Deka is an artist from rural Assam. She holds a Bachelors in Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Guwahati, Kokrajhar College of Music and Fine Arts, Assam, and a Masters in Fine arts in Painting from Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. She is the recipient of the Serendipity Artist Residency (2023) and the Lalit Kala Research Scholarship (2021-22).
Her work reflects rural life and nostalgia, and her art practice involves working with local communities, especially farmers. She is passionate about indigenous food culture and other interesting elements of village life, and expresses aspects of her life both as a woman artist and farmer in urban and rural areas through these mediums.
Traditional workers and their indigenous techniques have given way to some visual vocabulary in her work, where she studies and follows the working style and daily life of farmers and artisans. Her work involves periodic examinations of traditional indigenous arts and crafts, community-based projects, and spans multiple mediums such as sculptural installations in materials including bamboo, film, and photography.
Surajit Mudi
Surajit Mudi is a visual artist from Bankura, West Bengal who currently lives and works in Santiniketan, West Bengal. He completed his Bachelors and Masters of Fine Art from the Department of Painting, Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan.
Surajit is an interdisciplinary practitioner working with alternative practices of photography in a variety of spaces. His practice primarily originated and emerged during the pandemic amidst scarcity of resources, where he made his cameras using limited materials. He perceives the camera as a negative producer, on which light could be directly exposed in order to create images from his immediate surroundings.
He has been exploring the idea of working with performative image-making practices and unfolding the whole process by engaging in different public spaces. He looks forward to studying the complexity that comes with mobility and interactions with the public and the conversations that arise through this process.
He views his practice as a form of revival of the traditional printing and photo development process with a different purpose; to understand its relevance in the 21st century, where an ample amount of pictures already exist and new images are being continuously generated, mostly seen but rarely experienced.
You can learn more about the Fine Art Award on our website here.
