What to Expect

As we find ourselves imprisoned in these technocratic ravaged landscapes— breathing polluted air, drinking poisoned water and eating hormone-injected and chemical-sprayed food—we find ourselves prisoners of our own making. Interact with artist Sharbendu De as he parses this existential anthropogenic decay and considers the future with his work.

Speaker bio

Sharbendu De (b. 1978) is a contemporary lens-based artist, academic and a writer. He was the 2022 Visiting Artist Fellow at the Harvard University, and an artist-in-residence at the Hampi Arts Lab in 2024. De has received multiple grants from the India Foundation for the Arts (2017), Lucie Foundation (2018), Prince Claus Fund & ASEF (2019), MurthyNAYAK Foundation (2021), KHOJ (2021) and National Geographic Society (2023). He was shortlisted for the BBA Gallery Artist Prize (2022), LensCulture Visual

Storytelling Awards (2019), Lucie Foundation’s Emerging Artist of the Year (2018) as well as nominated for Magnum Foundation Heat Fellowship (2024, 2023), Leica Oskar Barnack Awards (2022) and Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Grant (2022) among others. In 2018, Feature Shoot recognised De as an Emerging Photographer of the Year. He has exhibited across the Harvard University, Griffin Museum, Gabrovo Biennale, Guangdong Times Museum, Asian Art Biennale, Rencontres d'Arles, Photoville, India Art Fair, Vadehra Art Gallery, Shrine Empire Gallery, PhEST, FORMAT, Serendipity Arts Festival and MOPLA among others. In 2021, he had a solo of his latest conceptual series An Elegy for Ecology at the Shrine Empire Gallery in New Delhi. His works are in several private and public collections. Deeply invested in the climate and ecological discourse, De is currently working on the sequel to An Elegy for Ecology. De has contributed to several books including 108 Portraits of Indian Photography (2024), ed. Dr. Alka Pande, Arthshila, Multispecies Speculations (2022), ed. Ravi Agarwal, and Folk Costumes, Indo-Pacific Air (2022), ed. Urtzi Grau & Guillermo Fernández-Abascal, Art Paper Editions (APE). He is also running an online mentorship program for South Asian visual storytellers working on the climate crisis to build an ecosystem based on kinship making philosophy and telling pertinent and urgent stories on the raging climate crisis. This initiative of de started in 2023 (envisioned in 2022) is supported by PhotoSouthAsia, an initiative of the MurthyNayak Foundation, USA. Over the last 12 years, De has taught photography and visual communications across several Universities and educational institutions in India.

Moderator Bio

Akansha Rastogi is Senior Curator of Exhibitions and Programming at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi, India. She has been part of the core instituting team of the museum since 2011. As a creative practitioner, she is the founding member of artist collective WALA (formed in 2009), and is intensely involved with many artists-led initiatives and forums in New Delhi. Her research and writing focuses on exhibition histories of modern and contemporary Indian art, institutional memory, museum studies and storytelling. She studied Art History at National Museum Institute and English Literature at Delhi University.

Akansha’s exhibitions, ‘Hangar for the Passerby’ (2017), ‘Zones of Contact/Grazing’ (2013), ‘Inhabiting the Museum’ (2011-15) and ‘Archiving the Studio’ (2011) have been ingenious for their curatorial thinking, approaches and conceptual rigour. Each one positioning and imagining contemporary art museum space in South Asia as an incremental site for the undigested materials and histories. She served as associate curator of India Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019). Since 2019, she is leading a multi-year program at KNMA under the framework of ‘Young Artists of Our Times’ (YAOT), under which she has curated four exhibitions and thought-forms, the most recent one was 'Very Small Feelings' co-curated with Diana Campbell and presented at Dhaka Art Summit 2023, and others are 'Right to laziness... No, strike that! Sidewalking with the man saying sorry' (2020), Summer's Children (2019), Smell Assembly (2019).