Royal College of Art x Serendipity arts foundation
About
The Royal College of Art (RCA) and Serendipity Arts Foundation (SAF) have forged a collaborative effort to establish a Senior Artist Residency program, offering a unique opportunity to one established Indian artist, jointly nominated by the two institutions, to spend three months immersed in the vibrant atmosphere of RCA’s campuses in London.
The program will encourage the artist to critically interact with RCA’s academic community, consider their own artistic practice, and explore how their practice has evolved over their career. Equipped with access to RCA’s state-of-the-art infrastructure and closely engaging with the MA courses in Contemporary Art Practice and Curating Contemporary Art, the resident artist will be provided with resources to further develop their work.
Beyond individual artistic growth, this residency aims to bridge the artistic landscapes between India and the UK. The culmination of the residency will manifest in an exhibition or talk in London, followed by a showcase of the artist’s work at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa in December.
For the inaugural edition, the nominated artist is Sukanya Ghosh.
Our joint initiative marks a significant milestone as this is the first time in RCA’s history that the institution has hosted an Artist-in-Residence of South Asian origin. We welcome this as a constructive step towards bridging barriers to access and addressing infrastructural gaps for creative practice in the Global South.
Sukanya Ghosh’s artistic practice spans painting, photography, animation and the moving image. She works with the minutiae of urban life, the fantasy of popular culture and the shape shifting of memory. Her work with family archives, found images, medical imagery and text traverse illusory narratives and sensory passages, working extensively with the techniques of collage, erasure and deconstruction. She studied Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda and Animation Film Design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Her recent solo exhibition: The Parting of Ways, curated by Rahaab Allana was at Cymroza Gallery Mumbai in 2023. Other shows include Imaging Arrivals for Departures, curated by Veerangana Solanki, Exhibit 320, Delhi, 2024; Sheher Prakriti Devi, curated by Gauri Gill, Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai 2024; Mycelial Legacies, curated by Deeksha Nath, 2023 Delhi; Imagined Documents, curated by Ravi Agarwal, Rencontres d’Arles 2022; The Texture Of Promises, curated by Alejandro Castellote, Tabakalera, 2022 San Sebastian; VAICA: Indian Contemporary Video Art Festival, 2021; Vantage Point: Sharjah 9, Sharjah 2021 and Repairing the Work of Time curated by Francois Cheval, Lianzhou Museum of Photography, China. She has been awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Award; project commission for 5 Million Incidents (Goethe Institut and RAQS Media collective) and the Flash France Artists Commission 2017-18 (French Embassy in India) among others. She has been Artist-in-Residence at the Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium; Khoj, New Delhi; Spike Island, Bristol and AIR Vallauris, France. She has extensive graphic design experience, is an occasional teacher and has managed Arts programmes. She lives and works between Delhi and Calcutta.
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