AWA 2021 Winner Premjish Achari on residency at Atelier Mondial

Winner of the Art Writers’ Award 2021, Premjish Achari is a curator and art critic based in Delhi. Achari has started an in-depth curatorial platform called Future Collaborations aiming at theoretically and politically informed curation. Co-curator of Bhubaneswar Art Trail 2018, Achari also currently heads the programme and the editorial for the ‘Lokame Tharavadu’ exhibition organised by Kochi Biennale Foundation and teaches art history and theory at Shiv Nadar University.

During his time in Switzerland, Achari will conduct research on the collaborative social practices in contemporary Indian art vis-à-vis the Swiss context. Since 2015, Achari has been curatorially preoccupied with the idea of collaboration and through various exhibitions tested its veracity and importance in contemporary art. His residency aims to understand the various forms of collaborations, the processes and inherent tensions in these forms of collaborations and finally unravel the ethical and political nature of such coming together of artists and the community. During his stay, he will engage with various artist groups, collectives and individual practitioners to examine how they reconfigure the work of art and its reception. His research will try to understand how these practitioners subvert normative practices of work/labour, ideas of community and imagine newer possibilities of coming together and working together. This comparative framework will allow Achari to critically interrogate the community-oriented collaborative practices in India and the failure of contemporary art to imagine a community.

Follow Achari on Instagram @thepartialprofile
and Twitter @premjish