Generator Cooperative Art Production Fund Grantees | Round 6 | March 2023

Experimenter Labs announces the sixth round of recipients of the Generator Cooperative Art Production Fund. We are proud to support projects by Arjun Panayal, Hania Mariam Luthufi, Khandakar Ohida, Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq, Princess Taroza, Priyanka Kumar, Rajaram Shivram Naik, Riti Sengupta and Riya Talitha Samuel and Panchsheel Gaikwad. The sixth round of applications was evaluated by curators Adam Szymczyk, NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, artist Sanchayan Ghosh, and the Experimenter team.

Arjun Panayal (b.1997) practice engages with questions of memoryscapes and conceptual ruminations on the affective dimensions of the (im)material world, while confronting the often-imperceptible changes that occur around us.

 

Arjun will utilise the grant for his project How to Reframe: Reappearance as Declarations, a research-based creative forum, that attempts to examine the complexities of Northern Kerala’s terrestrial landscape. The project traces a number of shifts, reframing aesthetics, material objects, and historical narrative, from subjects to objects and back.

 

Arjun is based in Kasargod, Kerala, India

Hania Mariam Luthufi (b.1989) is a vocalist, composer and music educator. Her recent work comprises of abstract, cinematic compositions exploring the vast possibilities of drone music. Hania is currently researching dialects of Arabic and Tamil through archiving lost devotional songs from communities in the eastern and northern coastlines of Sri Lanka.

 

Hania will utilise the grant for her ongoing project, Shifting Tides, focusing on the collection of folk song and story-telling traditions which are at the risk of erasure, particularly in the mountainous central, east and northern areas of Sri Lanka.

 

Hania is based in Colombo, Sri Lanka

Khandakar Ohida (b.1993) is a visual artist and filmmaker interested in personal memory, marginalized voice, collective trauma, and nonlinear stories interacting with various cultural layers of society.

 

Ohida will utilise the grant to make a film documenting the story of her 71-year-old uncle’s desires to make a museum in his mud house. He has been collecting everyday objects since 1973, but his house was demolished and now he is only dreaming of his Museum on the Moon.

 

Ohida is based in Hoogly, West Bengal, India

Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq (b.1995) is a photographer. His practice addresses issues of social, geographical, and political significance.

 

Fatiq will utilise the grant for his ongoing project Mirage, a series of photographs that attempts to highlight the corruption behind many construction projects in Bangladesh. He will be photographing bridges that started to be built in rural Bangladesh in the last two decades - but that now lie abandoned and unused.

 

Fatiq is based in Cumilla, Bangladesh

Princess Taroza (b.1998) is an independent filmmaker, treading between fiction and documentary filmmaking in communities. Her practice focuses on cinematography, editing and expands her ways of seeing, experimenting with its other forms.

 

Cess will utilise the grant for her beach-front office desk installation offering Beach Retirement Benefit Plans, The project explores a response to a form of otherness in spaces we consider common.

 

Cess is based in Davao, Philippines

Priyanka Kumar (b. 1993) is a visual artist who searches for a feeling of community and safety in today's dark and greedy world by creating a bridge between the past and present time. Her work primarily involves researching by associating events from Indian Mythology to the present time.

 

Moving towards a multidisciplinary approach, she will create 12 individual works of prints, multimedia and integrating sound in representing stories and instances from Indian Mythology and folklore set in today's time.

 

Priyanka is based in New Delhi, India

Rajaram Shivram Naik (b. 1993) is an interdisciplinary artist. His research and community-led artworks range from photographs, videos, installations and sculptures.

 

Rajaram will utilise the grant to document ritualistic and gender-based narratives through his research with the male actors of Dashavatara, who play roles of all genders in their depiction of mythology. The work is intended to make one witness a particular history of the form and the actors through documentation.

 

Rajaram is based in Pernem, Goa, India

Riti Sengupta (b.1993) is a photographer who, with her work, wishes to deconstruct the ways in which women have been traditionally represented in Indian photography.

 

Riti will utilise the grant to continue her project, Things I can't say out loud, a series of photographs which confront the different forms of patriarchy which have seeped into her and her mother’s life, asking them to romanticise the role of ‘giving’ as the absolute pinnacle of achievement in a woman’s life.

 

Riti is based in Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Riya Talitha Samuel (b.1999) is a reporter and her creative partner Panchsheel Gaikwad, an independent multimedia creator and filmmaker, are Ambedkarite cultural producers from Dalit backgrounds who aim to showcase their community with dignity, joy, and humanity.The stories they document echo their own, making their work a conduit for their community’s creative potential.

 

The grant will be utilised for their project Next is Now, which documents Ambedkarite artists, their systemic challenges in sustaining themselves within the creative industries and how their politics inform their practices but without tokenisation or stereotypes.