Generator Grantees | Round 9 | June 2025

  • The Generator Cooperative Art Production Fund announces the grantees in its ninth round. We are proud to support 14 incredible...
    The Generator Cooperative Art Production Fund announces the grantees in its ninth round. We are proud to support 14 incredible projects by: Aishwarya Arumbakkam, Farheen Fatima, Jatin Gulati, Jovita Alvares, Mekh Limbu, Moinak Guho, Omkar Khandagale, Pushpa Murmu, Ritwika Pal, Sadia Marium & Aungmakhai Chak, Sukanya Deb, Swati Kumari, Vasudhaa Narayanan, and Yaoreipam Makang & Krupa Desai. This round of applications was evaluated by photographer and curator Dayanita Singh, artist Sanchayan Ghosh, and artist Shilpa Gupta, with the Experimenter team.
  • Aishwarya Arumbakkam

    Aishwarya Arumbakkam

    In Aishwarya Arumbakkam's (b.1988) practice, photography shapes her connection to the physical world, tethering her to things that worry and excite her, that she longs for, and wants to hold on to. She works across photography, video, and drawing.

    The grant will support Arumbakkam's project, Like rainclouds moving between branches of lightning, where she uses photography to visually map Tamil identity, womanhood, and landscape. In these images, hair becomes both language and landscape, both exterior and interior. At a documentary level, it is an incomplete and imperfect typology of hair in Tamil Nadu.
     
    Aishwarya Arumbakkam is based in Chennai, India.
     
    Photo credit: Uma Bista

  • Farheen Fatima

    Farheen Fatima

    Farheen Fatima (b. 1994) is a photographer and visual artist. Her practice focuses on tenderness, belonging, and the emotional landscapes of everyday life, often in overlooked small cities and public spaces. Working primarily with digital, film, and cyanotypes—often hand-altered to make emotional additions—she builds intimate narratives that resist spectacle, foregrounding softness, care, and memory. 
     
    With the support of the grant, she will complete her project Tender in the Middle, which seeks to understand young queer culture in small Indian cities through portraiture. Through intimate, hand-altered portraits, she is building a collaborative, emotional gaze shaped by local culture, personal memory, and care. Fatima believes that the project is about learning to see Indian queer beauty as it's lived.
     
    Farheen Fatima is based in Chandigarh, India.
     
    Photo credit: Jagjit Singh
  • Jatin Gulati

    Jatin Gulati

    Jatin Gulati (b. 1992, Haryana) explores how public imagery shapes dominant socio-political and familial ideologies. He reinterprets archives through photography, text, and drawing to construct alternative narratives of the present.
     
    Jatin will use the grant to continue working on his project Effigy of Man (2023–present) that looks at the images of his grandfather, acknowledging them as evidence of the societal gaze shaped by migration histories and patriarchal ideals. Through studio portraiture and collage, he performs with the images, confronting the male body as a representation of dominant masculinity within a family structure.
     
    Jatin Gulati is based in Bengaluru, India. 
     
    Photo credit: Vshpag
  • Jovita Alvares' (b. 1993) artistic research is fuelled by finding alternative ways to excavate marginalised narratives/counter histories that have been...
    Jovita Alvares' (b. 1993) artistic research is fuelled by finding alternative ways to excavate marginalised narratives/counter histories that have been lost as a result of colonial/imperial legacies. As a researcher, Alvares finds intersections between her art-making and writing, and allows both facets to inform and complement each other.
     
    The grant will support the materialisation of "Can distance be measured when a line is drawn in the sand?", an installation that will be part of Edition 9 of Colomboscope in January 2026, in Colombo, Sri Lanka. This is part of her ongoing research that centres on the Portuguese colonisation of Goa (1510–1961) and the Partition of India (1947) that incited layers of erasure and exclusion, which led to the exclusion of various minorities from the Subcontinent's history. Through the lens of her family's Goan history, she will explore these gaps, dislocations, and her notions of home, belonging, and identity. The installation will look deeper at the Arabian Sea as a witness to the Subcontinent's imperial and political legacies, resulting in marginalized histories, and her family's migration process.
     
    Jovita Alvares is based in Karachi, Pakistan.
  • Mekh Limbu

    Mekh Limbu

    Mekh Limbu is a Yakthung artist from Dhankuta. His works explore indigenous identity, intergenerational dialogue, and labour migration through archival matter, textiles, and rituals to challenge dominant narratives that often occlude his community's history. 
     
    The Generator grant will support his project that draws from traditional vocabularies such as weaving and chanting to contextualize contemporary struggles. Focusing on Mukkumlung, a sacred Yakthung site under threat, it interweaves archives, oral histories, and community collaboration, culminating in artworks that respond to recent protests demanding for protection of indigenous rights.
     
    Mekh Limbu is based in Kathmandu, Nepal. 
    Photo credit: Kireet Rajbhandari
  • Moinak Guho

    Moinak Guho

    Moinak Guho (b. 1986) is a filmmaker whose practice stems from a personal inquiry into existential themes, articulated through an observational style and shaped by the contemporary socio-political milieu.
     
    With the help of the grant, he will make DOOMED, his debut full-length documentary, a mixed-media project that situates a sinking island as a site of intersecting crises—ecological collapse, ideological inertia and urban-social fatigue. It foregrounds how neoliberal hegemony, failed leftist mobilization, and the politics of fear contribute to a broader disintegration of resistance and collective agency.
     
    Moinak Guho is based in Kolkata, India. 
    Photo credit: Durbar Mandal
  • Omkar Khandagale

    Omkar Khandagale

    Omkar Khandagale (b.1999) is a Pune-based documentary filmmaker and cinematographer whose practice is rooted in the intersections of caste, memory and inheritance. Hoping to reframe the narrative around caste, he attempts to use his camera as a conscious tool in order to create a space for agency and reflection for the members of his family and community.
     
    Khandagale will use the grant to develop the next phase of his feature documentary, which traces family, caste, labor, and migration through four interconnected threads. It will build on a 20-minute segment that focuses on his relationship with his grandparents and explores the role of his camera within that space. The next part, 10–15 minutes long, will center on Khandagale's uncles' caste-based occupation and his parents' brief migration to America. 
     
    Omkar Khandagale is based in Pune, India. 
     
    Photo credit: Abhay Sharma
  • Pushpa Murmu (b. 1995) is a grassroots development practitioner focused on tribal communities—empowering women, promoting indigenous cuisine, preserving cultural heritage,...
    Pushpa Murmu (b. 1995) is a grassroots development practitioner focused on tribal communities—empowering women, promoting indigenous cuisine, preserving cultural heritage, and driving sustainable change through inclusive, community-led initiatives and capacity building.
     
    Murmu will use the grant for her project, A glimpse of santhali delicacies-a journey through culinary heritage. It is a year-long project that aims to document the Santhal community's indigenous cuisine through participatory research. By engaging elders and women, it will capture traditional recipes, oral histories, and cultural practices, resulting in a community-led cookbook, visual documentation to preserve heritage, foster pride, and encourage cultural exchange.
     
    Pushpa Murmu is based in Jamshedpur, India. 
     
    Photo credit: Aman Murmu
  • Ritwika Pal

    Ritwika Pal

    Ritwika Pal is an actor and writer from Kolkata, primarily working in films. She is the founder of Curry Projects and works with mixed-media videos. Pal is interested in expanding the forms of filmmaking and possibilities of new media and looks to explore the intersection of the two in her work.
     
    The grant will support Welcome to the Jungle, a mixed-media short film set in Kolkata. It follows the character of a 25-year old chronic internet user. The film will combine screen recordings, animations, generative art, and found footage.
     
    Ritwika Pal is based in Kolkata, India. 
     
    Photo credit: Aditya Varma
  • Sadia Marium and Aungmakhai Chak Sadia Marium and Aungmakhai Chak

    Sadia Marium and Aungmakhai Chak

    Sadia Marium and Aungmakhai Chak are the founding members of Kaali Collective. Marium dreamt of being a filmmaker, worked as a merchandiser, and is currently an independent photographer based in Dhaka and Chattogram. Ordinary characters, unremarkable memories, are the protagonists of her works, tracing the distinction and overlap between reality and fiction, private and public. Chak explores identity and representation through mythology, folklore, and current political climate. Originally from Chittagong Hill Tracts, she is a freelance photographer, and is currently studying media and art at Tampere University of Applied Science, Finland. 
    Sadia Marium and Aungmakhai Chak will use the grant to publish their book Operation Marine Drive: a full-length Bengali Movie–an ensemble of text and photographs. The work registers the unstated terror, surveillance, and secrecy the duo felt that the road Marine Drive has witnessed and paved with.
     
    Sadia Marium and Aungmakhai Chak are based in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
     
    Sadia Marium Photo credit: Moinak Kanungo
  • Sukanya Deb

    Sukanya Deb

    Sukanya Deb (b. 1995) is a writer, curator and editor based in New Delhi. She recently launched Purée Mag, an online magazine.
     
    Purée Mag publishes across culture and criticism, serving a blend of art, film, fashion, lit, design and tech. This editorially led project aims to bring about a shift in dialogue by pushing critical positions that respond to contemporary life and politik. For writing that does not miss the point.
     
    Sukanya Deb is based in New Delhi, India.
  • Swati Kumari

    Swati Kumari

    Swati Kumari's (b. 1995) practice explores generational tiredness and the travels of women. She makes drawings, soft sculptures, video, installations, and books in participatory settings such as reading and conversations.
     
    With the support of the grant, Swati's project will explore generational tiredness in maternal bodies, tracing her lineage from urban Ghaziabad to ancestral villages in Bihar. Through textiles, letters, and soft sculptures, she explores rest (aaraam) and tiredness (thakaan) in women's lives. Her installation invites reflection on unrecorded female histories, creating a rhizomatic 'neighbourhood' that challenges patriarchal structures and foregrounds embodied, domestic, and migratory labour.
     
    Swati Kumari is based in Ghaziabad, India.

    Photo credit: Mohit Shelare
  • Vasudhaa Narayanan

    Vasudhaa Narayanan

    Vasudhaa Narayanan (b. 1991) is an artist and researcher exploring gender, domesticity, and the body through photography, text, sculpture, and performance. Her work uses conceptual imagery to interrogate ideas of otherness, and examine how social, cultural and political structures govern bodily autonomy, and shape women's lived experiences.  
     
    The grant will support her project Spoiled fruit, that builds upon the relationships between the feminine, the social, and the patriarchal. In an attempt to uncover the several layers of shame, guilt, and patriarchal pressures that are inherent in the lives of women in India, she will engage in intimate and personal conversations with them and discuss the complex relationships they have with their own bodies. 
     
    Vasudhaa Narayanan is based in Mumbai, India. 
     
    Photo credit: Colleen O' Toole
  • Yaoreipam Makang and Krupa Desai collaborate under Zingko Art Collaborative. Makang (b.1989) is an educator, researcher and writer working on... Yaoreipam Makang and Krupa Desai collaborate under Zingko Art Collaborative. Makang (b.1989) is an educator, researcher and writer working on...
    Yaoreipam Makang and Krupa Desai collaborate under Zingko Art Collaborative. Makang (b.1989) is an educator, researcher and writer working on cultural and artistic histories of the Naga tribes. Desai (b. 1989) is an artist, curator and researcher interested in visual and cultural histories.
     
    The Generator grant will support the duo's project, The Artists of Ringui, that traces the histories of filmmaking in the Manipur hills. It will document and archive the artistic contributions of singers, filmmakers, lyricists, writers, composers, and actors from the village and explore their stories about what drives them to make films in the absence of any commercial funding or government support, often in the backdrop of a hostile political environment.

    Yaoreipam Makang and Krupa Desai are based in Mumbai, India.