BCA#3: Artists and Activists and the Challenge of Climate Change

Cyrus Guzder is Chairman and Managing Director of AFL Private Limited, a pioneer in air and ocean freight, travel management and express delivery services in India. He played a key role in introducing International express delivery services in India by launching DHL Worldwide Express in India, a Company he headed for 25 years till it was acquired by Deutsche Post. He is currently on the Board of Mahindra Holidays and Resorts India Ltd, The Great Eastern Shipping Company Limited and The Administrative Staff College of India. He has also served on the Boards of Air India, Alfa Laval, Tata Infomedia, The Indian Institute of Human Settlements, the Local Advisory Board of Barclays Bank, India; and also as a Member of the Board of Governors of Reserve Bank of India’s Banking Codes and Standards Board of India. He has been a Trustee of the CSMVS (Prince of Wales) Museum. Subsequently he was instrumental in establishing in the Museum, the Jehangir Nicholson Gallery of Modern Art, which houses the invaluable modern art collection of the late Jehangir Nicholson. He co-founded the Bombay Environmental Action Group, an active environment and heritage protection organisation; and set up the Mumbai Chapter of the INTACH Foundation. He is currently a Trustee of the Urban Design & Research Institute (UDRI), The Marg Art Foundation and The Asiatic Society of Bombay. He has a Master’s (Hons.) Degree from Cambridge University, UK, majoring in Sanskrit and Indian Archaeology. He has participated in three seasons of exploration and excavation in Western India with a joint team of Cambridge University and the Archaeological Survey of India.

Revanta Sarabhai is a dancer, choreographer and actor from Ahmedabad and forms the third generation of the legendary dance family after Mrinalini Sarabhai and Mallika Sarabhai, both world renowned artistes. Having made his solo classical dance-debut at age 8, Revanta’s work has been showcased at prestigious festivals and venues across India, Europe, UK and USA. Revanta made his film acting debut in 2017 and has played the lead in four Gujarati feature films and hosted a popular dance reality show on TV. He is also an experienced workshop trainer specialising in using aspects of movement and theatre for training corporate employees and people from fields other than the performing arts to develop right-brain capacity and creativity. Combining his classical dance training with a contemporary practice, Revanta creates cutting-edge work that is honest, immersive, and relevant to the society and times we live in.

Ranjit Hoskote has been acclaimed as a seminal contributor to Indian art criticism and curatorial practice, and is also a leading Anglophone Indian poet. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking 2014), and Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton 2018); and the monographs Zinny & Maidagan: Compartment/ Das Abteil (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/ Walther König 2010) and Atul Dodiya (Prestel 2014). Hoskote curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011). He co-curated the 7th Gwangju Biennale with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim (2008). He was co-convenor, with Maria Hlavajova, Kathrin Rhomberg and Boris Groys, of the exhibition-conference platform Documents, Constellations, Prospects (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2013). He co-curated, with Rahul Mehrotra and Kaiwan Mehta, the exhibition-conference platform The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India (National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay, 2016).