SOMA SUROVI JANNAT (b. 1980) is an artist from Bangladesh whose practice spans drawing, painting, installation, and video. Her work arises from a profound connection with nature, often honed through plein air sketching in villages across Bangladesh and India. Deeply inspired by conversations with rural communities and their traditional attitudes toward the environment, her drawings frequently integrate organic materials to create multi-dimensional spaces that encourage viewer interaction. Her recent body of work, inspired by the Sundarbans mangrove forests, addresses the global climate crisis and critiques the link between natural disasters and social inequalities.

Soma’s work has received significant recognition. She was awarded the Samdani Art Award at the 2020 Dhaka Art Summit, which included a residency at the Delfina Foundation, London; and the Young Artist Award from the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy that same year. In 2023, she became the first Bangladeshi artist to participate in the Frere Hall South Asian Artist in Residence programme at The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, which will host her solo exhibition in March 2025. She has also showcased her work at various international exhibitions, including Colomboscope 2024 (Sri Lanka), ‘Paint your own village’ at Kora Contemporary Arts Center (Italy, 2023), the Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa, India, 2018), and the 7th Beijing International Art Biennale (China, 2017).

Kishor Shinde is a Delhi-based painter whose abstract canvases and paper collages take inspiration from the bustling, chaotic cityscape he lives surrounded by in Delhi. The metropolis appears in his works as a mass of irregularly-shaped colour patches. They bring to mind aerial views of the city, distinguishing features simplified into geometry, with large blocks of colour evoking plots or buildings, ringed or bisected by strips in a contrasting hue that could be streets, all jumbled together, disordered, organic, in a state of flux – like metropolises everywhere in the world.

Shinde completed a diploma in painting from the MS University, Vadodara in 1981, and has had several solo shows – in Delhi at Triveni Kala Sangam (1990 and 1996), Art Inc (1999) and Mint Gallery (2008), and in Mumbai, at Sakshi Gallery (2004 and 2006). He participated in the Tenth Trienniale-India (2001), Second Beijing Biennale (2005), Fourth Beijing Biennale (2010), and the 2012 Bangladesh Art Biennale. He has participated regularly in group exhibitions across India since 1980, most recently in “Inner Life of Things: Around Anatomies and Armatures” (2022) curated by Roobina Karode the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and “Spatial” (2023) at Art Motif.

Shinde received the state Lalit Kala award in 1978 and the Lalit Kala Akademi Award for Painting in 1998. Shinde was also a recipient of the Harmony Art Foundation residency in 2007-08. His work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, and in several private collections.

Shinde lives and works in New Delhi