The 2024 Inlaks Fine Art Awardees
Anup Let, Jit Natta, Mothe Mahesh, Sewali Deka and Surajit Mudi
are the Inlaks Fine Art Awardees for 2024.
Today, meet Anup, Jit and Mahesh, and discover more
about their thought process and work.
Next week, we will feature Sewali and Surajit,
the other two awardees for this year.
Anup Let
Anup Let is from Mallarpur, West Bengal, and grew up in both rural and urban areas. With everyone in his family involved in music and painting as a part of daily life, he soon developed a love for art. After completing school, he studied in the Department of Painting at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan.
As an artist, he believes the presentation and exploration of artistic thought should be the primary context for making art. Art, to him, is communication with the outside world, which is closely intertwined with our daily lives. This visual medium is what he has harnessed through the ups and downs of life and carried through his art. He works through mediums like drawing, painting, performance art, and installation.
If we discuss the ‘landscape’ from a sociological perspective, we can understand it clearly. The landscape here refers to socio-political, cultural, and emotional aspects. This is an essential contemporary situation. Currently, he practises creative art through a new language called ‘queer landscape’, from a collective socio-community-centric perspective of Delhi and West Bengal. His work lays emphasis on gender and sexuality representation from a queer community perspective, through a process-based art practice that addresses aspects of body politic identity such as confinement, social exclusion, and patriarchy.
Jit Natta
Jit Natta has a Bachelors in Fine Art from Bengal Fine Arts College, Indira Kala Sangeet University, Khairagarh, and a Masters in Fine Art From Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, Department of Sculpture. He is currently pursuing his M.Phil. in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, West Bengal.
Jit is an interdisciplinary art practitioner and Dalit arts researcher whose work is rooted Bengal’s performative traditions. His journey in the visual arts spans lens-based mediums, installations, performances , drawings and sculptures. As a research scholar of Comparative Literature, he also works with translation, transcription and literary historiography.
His work explores various forms and elements from folk theatrical performative traditions. The Dalit aesthetics challenge the hegemonic understanding of culture, revealing obscured accounts. His installations and performances, rooted in the heritage of the Natta community that he has inherited, urgently engage viewers, disrupting spaces to reenergise them. As a practitioner from the Natta Community, he strives to bridge his art practice with the popular aesthetics deeply rooted in Bengal’s cultural settings.
The aim is to activate a sense of connection among community members and re-energise the potential from the past in the present, transcending limitations imposed by the hegemonic cultural understanding.
Mothe Mahesh
Mothe Mahesh has a Bachelors in Fine Arts from Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University, Hyderabad and a Masters in Fine Arts from the Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad, with sculpture being his chosen discipline for both. He is also a recipient of the Khoj Peers Residency.
His works are unconscious gestures mediated by mechanical components. These unconscious gestures are perhaps a result of the incompatibility of his reality and the forms of communication. The attempt is to recreate certain elements that he takes from the void within himself and communicate through sensory experiences like visuals, sounds, and mechanical movements.
The world around him provides him with a lot of material that is discarded, including both mechanical and electronic material but not limited by that medium. These materials have a possibility of being functional with very little, insightful intervention. He wants to go beyond the usual functions and let the material act in a way that may make us realize the nature of our existence. His work evokes experiences within the viewer through the movement and sounds produced by these materials. He has an impulse to communicate and share what's happening within and around us.
You can learn more about the Fine Art Award on our website here.
