Beyond Theory: Continuing the Work

Dr Nishant Shah is a feminist, humanist, technologist working in digital cultures. He wears many hats as an academic, researcher, educator and annotator, interested in translating research for public discourse and being informed by public discourse to orient his research.

He is the Professor of Global Media and Director of the Digital Narratives Studio at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, School of Communication and Journalism (Hong Kong); Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University (USA); Knowledge Partner to Point of View (Mumbai) and the Digital Asia Hub (Hong Kong/ Singapore); and a Member of the Supervisor Board, Tetem (The Netherlands).

His work is at the intersections of body, identity, digital technologies, digital governance, artistic practice, and activism. His current interest is in thinking through questions digital narrative practices towards building inclusive, diverse, resilient, and equitable societies.

Amjad Majid is the editor and founder of Inverse Journal. He has worked as a teacher, IT consultant, and research scholar in China, Spain and the US. In his free time, Amjad is a part-time art writer and critic, with writings featured in art catalogues, books, international exhibitions, biennales, art journals and magazines, with some of such writing translated into Chinese.

Beyond his extra-curricular work at Inverse Journal, Amjad works as an IT consultant while also teaching writing and literature. His interests include literary theory, Spanish and Spanish-American literature, contemporary art, cultural studies, hardware assembly, information technology and digital studies.

Annalisa Mansukhani is a writer, researcher and curator studying histories of photography and notions of the image in contemporary art and curatorial practices. Annalisa’s writing has been published by platforms such as ASAP | art, Zubaan Books, Write | Art | Connect and Projects/Processes (Serendipity Arts Foundation), TAKE on Art Magazine, Shared Ecologies, Hakara Bilingual, and Nether Quarterly, among others. She is one of the recipients of the first Critical Collective-PhotoSouthAsia Young Writer’s Award for lens-based practices, and most recently, she received the Art Scribes Award 2024, supported by the French Institute in India and Prameya Art Foundation, New Delhi.

As the Programmes Manager for the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) in Delhi, she establishes frameworks and activates resources around art and research, spaces of exhibition, critical writing, editorial and public programming. She lives and works in New Delhi, India.

Arnika Ahldag is Director-Curation and Exhibition at MAP. As an art historian, her interests cover the representation of labour in Indian contemporary art, institutional critique, exhibition histories and archives. She holds a PhD from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at JNU and an MA from University College in London, UK, and Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany.

Her curatorial projects include the public programme for IAF 2020 and Mapping Gender: Bodies and Sexualities in the Global South at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. She co-founded the Feminist Syllabus, which is part of the workshop series Pact of Silence, How to break it, a programme for intersectional feminist discourses in the arts. Over the past years, she has lectured at the National School of Drama and OP Jindal Global University in New Delhi.

Arushi Vats is a doctoral researcher pursuing a PhD in the History of Art, at the University of Cambridge, and an Associate Lecturer at the Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University. She is the recipient of the Momus – Eyebeam Critical Writing Fellowship 2021 and the Art Scribes Award 2021. She was a member of the curatorial panel for Kochi Muziris Students’ Biennale 2022.

She is the co-editor of the volume Imaginable Worlds: Art, Crisis and Global Futures published by University of Chicago Press (2023), and has published extensively in exhibition catalogues, art publications, and literary journals.

Indu Tharu is an artist, poet, and activist. As an indigenous Tharu woman, her writings, performances, and installations actively address the systematic erasure of her community’s voice. She explores themes of remembrance, loss, and violence and their impact on individual and societal consciousness. Her works are particularly informed by the recent People’s War in Nepal (1996-2006) and its effect on her family and community.

Drawing from her family’s archives, she investigates the role of underground publications in the struggle for Tharu identity recognition. Additionally, she has been documenting the contributions of Tharu women in various social movements across the Tarai. Her poems have been performed at numerous protests and are published in her book “Nilambit Nibandha.”

Jaisingh Nageshwaran is a self-taught lens-based artist and curator from Vadipatti, Madurai. His practice is deeply rooted in acknowledging the land and language he comes from. Through the documentation of his own family history, he not only represents, but also engages in conversation about broader social implications of identity and family. Jaisingh’s curatorial journey began with ‘The Lodge’, at the KG+ Select at the Kyotographie Festival, a public art festival in Japan. He further co-curated two editions of Vaanam Art Festival in Chennai and has also participated in the Khoj Curatorial Intensive South Asia Fellowship. He was awarded the Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac Photography Award in France.

Lavkant Chaudhary’s art is rooted in the the Tharu people’s long history of resistance to land dispossession, cultural erasure, and forced disappearances. By drawing on traditional knowledge systems—such as oral histories, seasonal dances, and godana (tattoo) markings—his work serves as a record of often overlooked narratives. His recent pieces examine and deconstruct key moments, including the 19th-century classification of Tharus as an enslavable or “masinya” caste by the Nepali state, the disproportionate impact of the People’s War (1996-2006) on Tharu civilians, and the recognition of Indigenous identities in Nepal’s post-2015 constitutional framework.

Malik Irtiza is an independent artist and researcher based in Srinagar, Kashmir. With a background in Visual Arts and History, her practice traverses across various media such as installation, video, sound, text, and sculpture. Situated at the intersection of artistic speculation and historical inquiry, her work seeks to develop possibilities for looking at time and voids emerging from contested territories.

Meenakshi Thirukode is a writer and researcher She currently heads communications and cultural partnerships at The Polis Project. Her areas of research focus on the role of micro-politics, culture and collectivity that’s located within the realm of a techno-capitalist, trans-nomadic, transient network of individuals and institutions. She ran  ‘School of IO (Instituting Otherwise)’ in 2019, dedicated to navigating ‘study’, as a radical feminist tool of political agency. Recent projects include ‘Kitchen Table Talks’ (2023) and ‘Disorganizing Metabolisms’ (2022) in collaboration with FAR (Food, Art, Research Network), the ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ conference at MAC Birmingham, UK (March 2018) and ‘Out of Turn, Being Together Otherwise’, exploring performance art histories in collaboration with Asia Art Archive (AAA) at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, India (December 15th-22nd 2018) .

Her chapter ‘Towards a Public of the Otherwise’, has been published in the Routledge Companion Series for Art in the Public Realm (2020). Thirukode was a Reading Resident and a contributor to the seminar US: Shaping Time at Stroom Den Haag, Hague, Netherlands (2022).

Mehreen Yousaf is an Exhibitions Programme Manager at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), and works with the permanent exhibition.

NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati lives and works in Kathmandu, Nepal. She is the co-founder and artistic director of photo.circle, Nepal Picture Library and PhotoKTM – platforms and initiatives that nourish image-making, history-telling, and dialogic engagements with diverse publics. As a cultural organizer, NayanTara enjoys working collaboratively with photographers, filmmakers, researchers, educators and others from various fields, to develop multidisciplinary exhibitions, publications, commissions, workshops and other co-productions and cultural tools.

NayanTara is committed to creating possibilities for people who think, make, speak and organize in different ways to come together in “imperfect solidarity” to learn, question, disrupt, and resist but also work towards repair.

Nishant Shah is a feminist, humanist, technologist. He directs the Digital Narratives Studio and the Masters in Global Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was the founder of the Center for Internet & Society, India,  Director of Digital School, Leuphana University, Germany, and Vice-President of ArtEZ University of the Arts, The Netherlands. He works as a knowledge partner bridging technologies, gender and sexual justice, and movement building across multiple networked communities in the Global Majority.

Palani Kumar is a documentary photographer.

Priyankar Bahadur Chand is a researcher traversing the crossroads of public health, history, and anthropology; incorporating archival and field-based methodologies in his works. His ongoing study includes assembling and contextualizing the archives of the SKIB-71 art collective, looking at the long history of disease and territory in the Tarai, and exploring the historiography of visual cultures in Nepal and the broader Himalayan region. He is also a co-founder of Kala Kulo, a space working with experimental and speculative approaches in Kathmandu.

Sarasija Subramanian is an artist based in Bangalore, India, where she is also the editor of Reliable Copy, a publishing house and curatorial practice for works, projects, and writing by artists. Reliable Copy was founded in 2018, and publishes books and documents, curates exhibitions and screenings, undertakes research projects, and hosts a wide variety of public programming. It is represented by the artists Nihaal Faizal and Sarasija Subramanian.

Soujanyaa Boruah is a new-media artist and an interaction designer working at the intersection of technology, art, education and ecology. Over a decade ago, she left the corporate world to move to the Himalayan foothills, where she has been deeply engaged in grassroots innovation and movements, particularly with pastoral communities. Her work focuses on designing ‘ecosystems of knowledge,’ spaces for intergenerational dialogues, participatory research, creative pedagogy, and conservation awareness.

She has exhibited her work at RIXC Open Fields Exhibition at National Library of Latvia, Utopia 2040 Reclaiming the Future at Helsinki, 15th AWID International Forum in Thailand, Kerala Museum in Kochi, for the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, Delhi and multiple wildlife sanctuaries across the northeast of India. She is also a founding member of Dhaarchidi, a young women’s collective (a FRIDA fund grantee), dedicated to fostering research and artistic expression.

Sukanya Baskar is a curator and designer working across photography, exhibition design, and publishing. Her work engages with archives through book design, scenography, and research.

She has curated exhibitions like O.P. Sharma and the Fine Art of Photography (1950s–1990s) at Shridharani Gallery, New Delhi (2024), which traced the evolution of photographic practice in post-independence India. Her book design projects include Witness: Kashmir 1986–2016 / Nine Photographers, listed in The New York Times’ Best Photobooks of 2017.

She also teaches exhibition graphics and design, focusing on how visual and spatial strategies shape exhibitions. Her current research looks at the intersection of photography periodicals, pictorialism in India, and exhibition design’s role in shaping visual culture.

Sukanya Deb is a writer and curator based in New Delhi, and founding editor of Purée Mag. With a background in Art History and Cultural Studies, the focus of her research has been visual culture and its contemporary intersections with media as an assemblage. As a writer and curator, she is interested in intersections and material residues of contemporary culture and media studies. She works as Programmes Manager at Shared Ecologies, a program by the Shyama Foundation.

Vishaka George is Senior Editor at PARI. She reports on livelihoods and environmental issues. Vishaka heads PARI’s Social Media functions and works in the Education team to take PARI’s stories into the classroom and get students to document issues around them.

YSK Prerana is largely interested in writing, language, and translations. They are the current Artistic Director of Conflictorium – Museum of Conflict, Chattisgarh, and Gujarat, wherein their role leads them to engage with bureaucracy critically and poetically; their primary aim is to express and embody (however failingly) ideology in practice. They were also the Festival Director for the Gender Bender Arts Festival, by Sandbox Collective, 2024. They have in the past worked with grassroots organizations that address concerns of body, land, sovereignty, and mobility, such as the National Institute of Urban Affairs, Delhi; The Urban Catalysts, Delhi; Apne Aap Women’s Collective, Mumbai; and Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health, Gadchiroli. They regularly facilitate gender sensitization workshop for educators and students, with recent collaborations with MICA, Ahmedabad; IIT, Gandhinagar; Institute for Rural Management, Anand; Slum Soccer, Nagpur etc. Occasionally, they make zines, moving image works and write sad poetry.