The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) awarded the Emerging Artist Award 2018 to New Delhi-based artist Anupam Roy.

Initiated in 2007, the FICA Emerging Artist Award, given in collaboration with Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council, seeks to promote young artists who demonstrate extraordinary skill and promise in the visual arts.

As part of the EAA 2018, Roy has received a ninety-day residency at Hochschule Luzern- Design & Kunst in Luzern, Switzerland supported by Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council.

Anupam Roy’s large-scale drawings and paintings speak about systemic violence and injustice. In recent years his practice is increasingly informed by what he terms as ‘excess’, extending George Bataille’s theorisation to considering the ‘representational impossibility of the subject’. He engages with the visual, textual and evidentiary, extending a variety of mediums and materials towards the performative and gestural, to achieve a travelling, discursive form that moves beyond the conventional exhibitory spaces, towards more dynamic public engagement.

Being closely associated with socio-political movements taking place in India today, Anupam emphasises the position of the ‘witness’ as ‘with-ness’, that is, the political strategy of the instigator(s), moving from comfortable passivity to active engagement and understanding of the ‘real’. Collective action and work is emphasised in his past works, as he notes the importance of collaboration in creating spaces of resistance. His practice also embraces impossibility and incompleteness as radical tools for engagement and disruption, through the rejection of complete narrative and codified knowledge systems.