Abhishek Hazra

Abhishek Hazra is an artist based in Bangalore. He uses video and performance that often integrate textual fragments drawn from real and fictional scenarios. Histories of science and an ironic fascination with theoretical approaches are just some of the interests that inform his practice. Abhishek has exhibited and performed widely in various institutions in UK, USA, Europe and India. Abhishek has also been the recipient of multiple awards including the 2011 Sanskriti Award for Visual Art and an earlier grant from IFA. Through this grant he intends to explore artistic sovereignty, in the context of the threats to digital privacy in the age of surveillance statecraft.

Abhishek imagines an island country called ‘Stoa’ (State of the Arts) with the cultivation of the Arts. Stoa has an embassy in Bangalore that is an asylum for dissenting artists, whose lives are under threat due to their activism regarding digital privacy. As a gratitude for giving them the asylum, these dissenting artists as a collective of abstract painters, make a series of abstract paintings called Sloppy Abstractions to be gifted to the diplomats in Stoa embassy. When Stoa gives these artists citizenship and safe passage, it is declined by the artists. The artists disappear with a note left to the diplomats, where they declare, “Instead of supporting artistic autonomy through statist structures, we will create temporary zones of autonomy.”

This project which will be presented as a recorded video lecture performance, borrows elements from ‘superfiction’, participatory art and institutional critique. Sardonically, the office of the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) is imagined as the embassy of Stoa in Bangalore and the staff at IFA as the diplomats. Abhishek will create the Sloppy Abstractions as Zoom backgrounds which he requests willing IFA staff to use in their calls with brief remarks on them. Some recordings of these will be inserted into the video of the lecture performance.

It is important for IFA to support this artwork that examines the structures of feeling between arts support institutions and artistic precariat, as well as the threats to digital privacy in the age of surveillance statecraft. The outcome of the project will be the video lecture performance. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA along with the final report will be the video of the lecture performance and the Zoom tapestries in the form of the Sloppy Abstractions.

This grant is made possible under the special initiative 25x25, with support from lead donor Kshirsagar-Apte Foundation, and philanthropy partners, Titan Company Limited, Priya Paul, and Sethu Vaidyanathan.