Writing Initiatives

A Choreographic Hopscotch Around Rituals, Cybernetics, Ethology, Embodiment, and Spirituality

Kiran Kumar

Kiran Kumar is an artist, researcher and writer whose practice holds a curiosity for dis/continuities between premodern and future worlds, as they play out at the intersections of art, science, philosophy and technology. Drawing from academic foundations in mechanical engineering, media art, and dance, as well as embodied yogic-tantrik practices, his transdisciplinary approach to research involves cycles of critical, conceptual and imaginative inquiries focused on entanglements between embodiment and environment. His works span across performance, writing and visual art as diverse modes of publication for artistic research. Kiran is currently based in the Auroville bioregion of coastal southern India.

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Cartographies of Attention

Stuti Bhavsar

Stuti Bhavar is a visual practitioner based in Vadodara. Through text, image, and research, and by probing light and time as vectors, she is interested in exploring the intersection of the bodily sensorium, the everyday environment in relation to the historical, and the relationship between a part and a whole; in-between words, conditions, interfaces, and gestures. Stuti did her graduation in Painting from The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 2019 and post-graduation in Visual Arts from Ambedkar University, Delhi, in 2021. Her writings have been published by ASAP |art, Home Sweet Home Studio, Museum of Art and Photography, and Serendipity Arts Foundation for its initiative ‘Write | Art | Connect’. Since 2021, in the varying capacity of a researcher and copy editor, she has worked for organisations such as the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Home Sweet Home Studio, India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), and Reliable Copy, among others.

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Unexpected Encounters with Moving Images: Aldona Video Club Experiment on Immediate Cinema and Archival Exploration

Akash Sarraf

Akash Sarraf is a writer, researcher, actor and filmmaker based in Bihar, currently a documentary film student at the Film & Television Institute, Arunachal Pradesh. For ASAP | Art, Akash has written about South Asian films critically engaging with socio- political themes from the points of expression and spectatorship. His writing aims to examine cinema as a medium and a potent force in shaping identity, culture, and ideologies by exploring the overt and covert meanings beyond the superficial layer of the text and images. Akash holds a postgraduate degree in Arts & Aesthetics from JNU and has been active in theatre as an actor and assistant director. His recent focus has been on documentary cinema and archives, and the epistemologically seductive power it holds of truth and revelation.

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Living with Bhupen

Georgina Maddox

Georgina Maddox is an independent critic-curator with 18 years of experience in the field of Indian art and culture. She blurs the lines of documentation, theory and praxis by involving herself in visual art projects. Besides writing on immersive art for STIRworld, she is a regular contributor for The Hindu, MASH Mag and Architectural Digest.

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Access as Invitation, Inclusion as Practice

Priti Salian

Priti Salian is an independent Indian journalist and the author of Reframing Disability, a fortnightly newsletter simplifying disability inclusion for content creators. Her work focuses on the intersections of disability, gender, global health and development, with reporting from India, Germany, and Uganda for outlets such as The Guardian, BBC, The British Medical Journal, and The Lancet. As an accredited media trainer, Priti specialises in Solutions Journalism and Gender Equality, Diversity and Inclusion with expertise in disability inclusion. In 2022, she was a fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, where she researched disability inclusion in India’s newsrooms and media coverage.

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Occupying Liminalities: Navigating a Residency

Saloni Jaiwal

Saloni Jaiwal is a writer and photographer based in New Delhi. Her photographic work seeks to archive diverse facets of urbanity. She completed her B.A. in English Literature from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, and her M.A. in Arts and Aesthetics from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has previously interned with the National Museum and Sahapedia. She has worked on various curatorial projects and exhibition texts with LATITUDE 28, including her curation Which Sky Do Birds Fly, which explores the politics of belonging, and her research for a publication on the artist Jyoti Bhatt. She has also managed the gallery’s projects at Art Dubai, Art SG (Singapore), and the India Art Fair. Her research interests include lens-based practices, moving images, and digital cultures. Her writings have been published in ART India Magazine, ASAP Art, and TAKE on Art Magazine. She has been the Writer-in-Residence for the Serendipity Arts Residency 2024 and is currently the Curatorial Fellow for the Gallerie Splash Curatorial Fellowship Programme 2024–2025.

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Empty, Found, and Future Spaces: On Workshopping Theatre and Architecture with Jean-Guy LecatBox, White Cube: Making a Case for Video-based Art Projects with Fields of Forces

Nidhi Krishna

Nidhi Krishna is a writer, theatremaker and dramaturg from Pune, India. She has an MA in Dramaturgy and Writing for Performance from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has found a stage at venues like Theatre Peckham, Omnibus Theatre, and Soho Theatre in London, as well as at Harkat Studios in Mumbai. She was longlisted for Tara Theatre’s seed commission program for South-Asian playwrights in 2024.

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Reimagine Visitations: Ladakh, Craft, and the Performance of Place

Padma Rigzin

Padma Rigzin is a social anthropology PhD candidate at the Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence. He is studying the changing human-snow leopard relationship and tourism in the Anthropocene. He studied Political Science with a BA and MA and has an MPhil in Development Practice from Ambedkar University, Delhi. For his MPhil, Padma lived in tribal-dominated parts of Central India (Odisha) for over two years, studying the socio-ecological dimension of tribal lifeworld. Padma has been associated with the Local Futures Ladakh team since 2019, working on the ecological knowledge systems and tourism-related issues in Ladakh. He has worked as a journalist for the Delhi-based Millennium Post newspaper. He often writes for Scroll.in The Wire, and The Indian Express. He has also published in academic journals like Economic and Political Weekly, Yeshe: A Journal of Tibetan Literature, Arts and Humanities, and Snow Leopard Reports.

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Women’s Worlds: On Time, Work, and Subjectivity

Radhika Saraf

Radhika Saraf is Associate Editor at ASAP | art. She is trained as a labour historian.

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Goan Archives: For a Future

Gulmehar Dhillon

Gulmehar Dhillon is Curator and Programs Manager at Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi, where she works on programs that foster critical dialogue across disciplines. Her research and curatorial interests focus on lens-based practices and the role of art in shaping and responding to evolving socio-political contexts. She holds a BA (Honors) in Journalism from the University of Delhi and an MA in Art History (Critical and Curatorial Studies) from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

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How Do We Taste Tomorrow?

Shalini Krishan

Shalini is the co-founder of Edible Archives, an award- winning restaurant as well as an experimental art project at the intersection of sustainability, indigenous foodways and education. She was instrumental in its inception at the Kochi- Muziris Biennale in 2018-19, its ongoing work on inter-Asia foodways at the Asia Arts Archives, Hong Kong, and, most recently, at the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah 2025. In her previous life as editor at several independent Indian publishing houses, Shalini was drawn to writing on queer and feminist politics, environmental justice, sustainability, and biodiversity. Recently, she has taught two courses on Food and Writing for Ahmedabad University. Presently, she is co-writing a book based on Edible Archives’ research into culinary and medicinal traditions in India and China. She also heads finance and branding for Bento Bento and Yo Colombo, in Bangalore, with an editor’s eye. She is a member of the Food Art Research (FAR) network.

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Shifting Mindsets with Material Explorations

Nidhi Dhingra

Nidhi Dhingra is an independent creative working at the intersection of art, culture and impact.With over-15 years of experience in publishing, she revels in research-and-people- driven storytelling through writing, illustration, and publication design. As a senior editor with Goodearth, she led over 30 projects exploring the lesser-known parts of India with publications for cultural institutions including the INTACH, ASI, Ministry of Culture. Drawn to nature, cultural explorations and deep conversations, Nidhi adopts a holistic-impact and people-centric approach to all that she does. As the Content and Communications lead for INK Talks, she was at the core of its two flagship programs — the multi-disciplinary INK conference and INK Fellows Program — while actively facilitating their newer outfits. Her current roster of clients include the WWF India, National Geographic, Royal Enfield Social Mission, Green Hub, Artst Foundation, and RoundGlass Sustain.

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To Flourish a Mould of Sculptural Form from a Flow of Fluidity

Dilpreet Bhullar

Dilpreet Bhullar is an editor and researcher whose writings explore visual culture, decolonisation, and curation. She holds an MPhil in Comparative Literature from the University of Delhi and has received fellowships from Columbia University’s Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability, and the International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination. Her essays appear in leading books, journals, and magazines.

As Associate Editor at the India Habitat Centre, she edited its visual arts journal and co-edited Third Eye: Photography and Ways of Seeing (2019) and Voices and Images (2015). She co-conceptualised the symposium Horizon and Perspective: Curatorial Gaze to Gauge Promise of Art in New Delhi. Her research-based photo project A Home in the Constant Flux: A Call to the Verb Memory has been exhibited across India. She is co-founder of Dastavez Collective and Managing Editor of TAKE on Art, dedicated to South Asian contemporary arts.

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Who's Afraid of Carbon?

Adreeta Chakraborty

Adreeta Chakraborty is a writer, editor, and researcher currently based out of Kolkata. She studied English literature through college and university and enjoys discovering the city in narrative. Her writing has been published by ASAP | Art, Critical Collective, The Karachi Collective, and The Telegraph. Having worked with arts organisations, publishing houses, and the media, she is drawn to editorially driven projects and initiatives that seek to foster support and cultivate a readership for new writing. She was also the Critic-in-Residence for Khoj Peers 2024.

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A Human Experience of Music as Exemplified in Indian Indigenous Genres

Shagun Butani

Shagun Butani is a distinguished Odissi exponent and among the few women performers of Seraikella Chhau in India. With over 25 years of performances, workshops, and lecture- demonstrations across India and abroad, she is known for preserving and reinterpreting India’s classical dance traditions. A core contributor to the Chhau dossier for UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list, she also founded the Sudhaaya Dance Foundation, which connects audiences to India’s cultural heritage.

Her work spans performance, choreography, curation, and research. She has curated acclaimed festivals such as Devi – Goddess on My Mind and Ek-Anant: The Unending One , and assisted in the curation of Eternal Echoes: The Resonance of Heart with Heritage for the Serendipity Arts Festival 2024. A visiting faculty at the Sushma Swaraj Institute for Foreign Studies, she lectures on India’s performing arts.

An educator and certified yoga instructor, Shagun integrates body awareness, storytelling, and traditional arts into her teaching, seeing dance as both spiritual inquiry and creative expression.

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The Topology of Touch

Suvani Suri

Suvani Suri is a practitioner based in New Delhi, India. Her artistic and research inquiries plumb the gaps, cracks and leaks found within the technological processes of production, mediation and perception of sound. Actively engaged in thinking through the relational and speculative capacities of listening, voicing, aural/ oral histories, acoustic ecologies and archival time, her questions often take the form of curatorial propositions, assemblies, workshops, publications, podcasts, auditory texts, objects, installations, live and discursive interventions.

Suvani’s works and ideas have been presented at Dystopie Sound Art Biennale, Singapore Art Museum, Serendipity Arts Festival, Kunsthalle Bern, Khoj Studios, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, amongst others. She has been a part of a collective investigation and working group -out-of-line-, which received the FICA Public Art Grant (2021). As the Associate Curator at Liquid Architecture (Melbourne) and Research Fellow Media Arts at Sarai-CSDS (New Delhi), she is interested in producing situations and scenes for gathering practices that critically engage with mediatic and sonic sensoriums, uncanny flows and uncommon infrastructures. She was one of the curators for the Students Biennale (Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022) and is in the curatorial team for the upcoming Listening Biennale (2025).

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We’re Already There

Sukanya Deb

Sukanya Deb is a writer, editor and curator, whose interest lies in the intersections of contemporary art, digital culture, technology and their material propositions. She established Purée Mag in 2024, in order to address critical positions in art and culture. She has been a recipient of Experimenter Generator Grant 2025, Khoj CISA Fellowship 2023, India Foundation for the Arts’ 25×25 Grant, and her writing has been featured in publications such as e-flux Education, STIRworld, ASAP | Art, Write | Art | Connect, AQNB, and others. Since 2022, she has been Programmes Manager at Shared Ecologies, an initiative of the Shyama Foundation.

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