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Sunil Gawde (born 1960, Mumbai) trained as a painter but his practice has evolved in later decades to include sculptures and kinetic installations. Gawde has showed at galleries, museums, fairs and biennales across the world. At the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, ‘Alliteration’, a two-ton kinetic piece by Gawde, was included in the exhibition ‘Making Worlds’, curated by Daniel Birnbaum. ‘Vicious Circle’, a 12-foot stainless steel pendulum, was part of ‘Finding India’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, in 2010; and in 2007, Gawde’s black, oversized ‘Blind Bulbs’ dominated Jumeira beach (and St.Tropez earlier) at the Special Projects section of Gulf Art Fair. Gawde has also done several commissioned public art projects, including a 3-tonne mechanized sculpture, ‘Galileo and his friends left me with these moons…’ (2012), as part of a HSR (high speed railway) Project by the Taiwan government – he was one of five artists invited. That year, he was also invited to create a public sculpture at the 'Parc De Sculptures’ in Al-Maaden, Marrakech (Morocco).
Among the other prominent international exhibitions Gawde has been part of are ‘Paris-Delhi-Bombay…’ (2011), curated by Sophie Duplaix & Fabrice Bousteau at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and ‘SPARSHA – Touching the senses, Ritual and contemporary Art’ (2014), curated by Thomas Hensolt at the Kunstmuseum Bochum in Germany.
The artist lives and works in Mumbai.
Sharad Sonkusale’s large and abstract canvases are meditations on grey, with hints of colour, and sometimes a touch of gold. His practice, arising from a core of personal and spiritual associations, is deeply meditative. Sharad begins by painting his canvases black – the ‘universal void’ he calls it – and then proceeds to cover it with small squares of rice paper and sometimes newspaper, to create a translucent layer of square grids. He then paints over this, beginning with the dot, a point of focused attention, which then aggregates to form dabs, dashes and lines that travel horizontally and vertically, and sometimes diagonally across the visual plane, creating abstract meandering patterns. The effect is that of an emotional landscape, a reflection of the artist’s own interiority, perhaps, but also one that invites viewers to engage with the surface and make of it what he will. Sharad is greatly inspired by Indian classical music and likens his work to its vibrations. Music often plays in the background while he paints, and sometimes he even carries his instruments to the studio.
Sharad Sonkusale has an MFA in painting from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai and a BFA from the Government Chitrakala Maha Vidyalay, Nagpur. He is a recipient of the 2016 National Award from the Lalit Kala Akademi and the Junior Fellowship of the Union Ministry of Culture. He has participated in several group exhibitions across India including the 2017 Biennale at Bharat Bhawan in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.
Samit Das, born in 1970 in Jamshedpur, specializes in painting, photography, collages and artist’s books creating multi-sensory environments through art and architectural installations. His fascination with the act of excavation has led him to build his own personal archives which he links to the larger context of architecture, urbanism, history and memory. His works become a philosphical reflection and an aesthetic composition with an interplay between traditional practice and modernity. His unique visual vocabulary through its many layered textures and abstracted forms become a testament to his deep interest in archiving and documenting.
Das studied Fine Arts from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan and later at the Camberwell College of Arts, London through the Charles Wallace India Trust award. He has held several solo shows and has been a part of numerous curated shows and projects in New York, Paris, London, Singapore, Senegal [Dakar Biennale], New Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai. He has documented the Tagore House Museum in Kolkata [1999-2001].
His research on the architecture of Santiniketan started from his MFA studies and has culminated in a publication – Architecture of Santiniketan : Tagore’s Concepts of Space. In 2011 he received the BRIC scholarship and in 2016 a Pro-Helvetia grant for research in Switzerland. His has had solo exhibitions at Clark House initiative and Tarq in Mumbai, India.
He has also been awarded the Pernod Ricard Fellowship for 2017 to work on Modern Indian Masters-Painters with a Paris Connection.
The artist lives and works in New Delhi.
Arunkumar’s sustained artistic investigation into a diversity of ecological concerns brings forth disharmonies, which are created by rampant consumerist culture. This spread is in inverse proportion to the great decline of natural resources and habitats. With each work, Arunkumar brings in his own local, historical and cultural milieu. The work becomes a generative rather than a conclusive commentary of his concerns regarding the environment at large.
His choice of medium (re-used and re-cycled goods), and consequently, the execution of such concern[s] reflects a negotiation between suburban life and a longing to return to his rural roots. The farmer takes on the role of the protagonist and also becomes the subject to assert the integral role s/he plays in the preservation of environmental bio-diversity.
Arunkumar’s solo shows include: CON-struction, Gallery Espace, New Delhi [2018]; In-site, Aicon Gallery, New York [2018]; Seed of Reckoning, Mumbai Art Room [2012]; Tract, Nature Morte, New Delhi [2010]; Feed, Nature Morte in New Delhi and Sakshi Gallery in Mumbai [2006].
He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in India and abroad. These include Embrace Our Rivers, Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Chennai [2018]; Sculpture by the Sea, Sculpture Biennale Aarhus Denmark [2015]; The Eye and The Mind: New Interventions in Contemporary Indian Art, China [2015]; Beyond Limits at San Diego Art Institute [2014]; Aesthetic Bind Citizen Artist: Forms of Address, Chemould, Mumbai [2013]; Crossing Space, Kunsthalle Faust, Hannover [2013].
Arunkumar has been awarded several national and international artist’s residencies: Art Omi International Artist Residency, New York, [2011]; Artist-in-Residence, University of South Australia, Adelaide [2007 & 2002]; Public Art Residency at JNU Campus, New Delhi [2005]; International Artists Camp, George Keyt Foundation, Colombo, [2005]; CHROMA, Public Art Project, Bergen, Norway [2003]; KHOJ International Artist-in-Residence, New Delhi & Modinagar [2000].
The artist works and lives in New Delhi.
Akshay Raj Singh Rathore is an artist whose practice centres around ground realities. His journey begins from the earth beneath his feet and stretches to the glamourized urbanisation we see in our cities. Rathore, through his work, critiques the mindless lack of sustainability in prevailing modes of agriculture in keeping with the demands of the market place. This in turn destroys life giving soil. Furthering his investigation, his work also draws attention to the consequences of the rampant and rapid urbanization above ground. He points his finger at a packaged consumerism, which tells stories of inequality, exploitation and colossal abuse.
His mediums range from painting to sculptural installation, from videos to performance-based social experiments, from clay and mud to barbed wire and steel. He is also developing video games into an art form.
His works have been exhibited at Gallery Espace, New Delhi; Les Maisons du Voyage, Paris; Sullivan Galleries, School of the Art Institute of Chicago and many others institutions in India and abroad. His residencies include KHOJ [2013, 2012 and 2009] and Pro Helvetia—Swiss Arts Council [2012].
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Shambhavi (born 1966) is a painter, printmaker, and installation artist currently based in New Delhi, India. Her artistic practice includes a wide variety of processes and media. Her work is largely non-figurative and focuses on the relationship between man and nature, as well as the social and metaphysical condition of the agricultural worker.
Shambhavi’s work is grounded in her upbringing in Bihar, which she said “nurtured and evolved her creative language.” But her extensive travels abroad – she has taken part in several art projects in the Netherlands, South Africa, Singapore – helped to sharpen her interest in the relationship between nature and man. Shambhavi works in new media and video alongside the more traditional mediums of painting, printmaking and sculpture.
Her work has been exhibited in solo shows as well as selected group shows in India, Singapore, Austria (Vienna & Salzburg), South Africa (Durban & Cape Town), Australia (Melbourne & Brisbane), New York, and the Netherlands. Her work was recently added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her work was also shown at the 2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
Tanmoy Samanta’s iconographic representations of everyday objects are rendered in an unfamiliar light by building a composition through multiple layers of rice paper with gouache colours. This instinctive rendition of objects and their relation to other elements in the composition initiates a deeper search for the viewer, for there is mystery concealed in its many layers. With geometric abstraction he gives form to recognisable objects heightened by the treatment of colours and translucence. His division of space, the illusion of depth and, the simultaneous blurring and sharpening in of contour give his compositions a surreal outcome imbued with symbolism. Close attention to his work is rewarded with subtle discoveries and uncertain visual paradigms.
Tanmoy Samanta was born in West Bengal and received his art education from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan. Tanmoy Samanta has displayed his work at Gallery Espace; New Delhi; Tarq and CSMVS, Mumbai; Anant Art Gallery, Kolkata and, The Gallery in Cork Street, London. He has participated in many art fairs across the world including Dubai, Dhaka and the India Art Fair. He has been a fellow at the Vermont Studio Centre, USA [2014] and is also, the recipient of the 2003 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award.
Tanmoy Samanta lives and works in New Delhi.
Ravi Agarwal is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, environmentalist, writer, and curator whose practice bridges art and activism. Working across photography, public art, video, text, and installation, he explores the intersections of ecology, labour, infrastructure, and environmental justice, examining how environmental crises reshape human and more-than-human worlds. Moving between documentary, conceptual, and performative modes, his work reimagines
photography as a critical and imaginative medium for engaging ecological futures.
Agarwal's work has been exhibited internationally at major museums and biennials, including Documenta 11 (2002), Indian Highway (2009), the Sharjah Biennial (2013), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016), the Yinchuan Biennale (2018), and the Havana Biennial (2019), alongside numerous solo and group exhibitions. He has served on numerous international art and photography juries, and his work is held in public and private collections.
As a curator, he has developed exhibitions and public art projects exploring the intersections of art and ecology, including Yamuna–Elbe: Twin City Project (2011), Embrace Our Rivers (2018), New Natures: A Terrible Beauty Is Born, Imagined Documents at Les Rencontres d'Arles (2022), and as Curatorial Advisor for Carbon at Science Gallery Bengaluru (2024). He also served as Photography Curator for the Serendipity Arles Photo Grant (2018–19). He was Co-Convenor of Bergen Assembly 2025 and a Visiting Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London.
He has published several photobooks and artist’s books, including Ambient Seas (2016), Extinct? (2009), Have You Seen the Flowers on the River? (2007), and Immersion: Emergence (2006). His landmark publication Down and Out (Oxford University Press, 2002) was among the first major photographic works on migrant labour in India. Recent projects include the multispecies art initiative Samtal Jameen, Samtal Jameer (2022), and Goethe Institute Bio-Design project.
Agarwal is also the author and editor of numerous books, including Practices of Hope, Nyogi Books (2026), Nature Contested , Orient Blackswan (2026), The Crisis of Climate Change, Routledge (2021), and Embrace Our Rivers, Kerber (2017). He has guest-edited special issues of Marg and the India International Centre Quarterly, and regularly publishes on art, ecology, and environmental humanities.
Alongside his artistic practice, Agarwal is the Founder-Director of Toxics Link, one of India’s pioneering environmental organisations, and founder of The Shyama Foundation, which supports art and ecology practices.. He is the recipient of the UN-IFCS Award for Chemical Safety and the Ashoka Fellowship. Trained as an engineer, Agarwal has spent over three decades shaping critical dialogue at the intersection of contemporary art, ecology, and public culture.
