Anushka Rajendran on research trip to Switzerland

Installation view, Omer Wasim, Component 2 from Rites Adrift at Khoj Studios in partnership with Shrine Empire Gallery.

Anushka Rajendran is the curator of Prameya Art Foundation (New Delhi) and also works independently as a curator and writer. Her ongoing curatorial research traces how the notion of public has acquired alternative significance to contemporary art in recent years, as well as the aesthetics of engagement within exhibition frameworks. This is informed by her previous research on responses by artists living in India in the 1990s to political and cultural trauma which has since expanded to encompass the South Asia region. She was the Festival Curator for Language is Migrant, the 2022 edition of Colomboscope, the only interdisciplinary arts festival in Sri Lanka and was on the curatorial team for Kochi Muziris Biennale 2018.

She has published essays in several publications including anthologies, academic journals and artists’ monographs. At the moment, she is editing the publication, Twenty Years of Britto (published by Steidl and supported by Documenta) which looks back at the vital work and legacy of Britto Arts Trust (Bangladesh), and also a monograph on Anoli Perera’s life and work.

During her research trip in Switzerland, Anushka will connect with artists and institutions whose practices sustain conversations that are relevant to creative communities in the South Asian context, continuing her practice of forging contextual and communal solidarities among practitioners who are negotiating ongoing instances of political and cultural trauma in ways that are not often legible to the priorities of national/cultural frameworks. Her ongoing conversations with peers and colleagues based in Switzerland around the question of rapidly shifting ecologies, as more than human presences that have shaped history, defined geographies, linguistic flows, indigenous systems of knowledge, circulation of resources, and time will form another line of inquiry.

Follow Anushka on Instagram @anushkarajendran