AVID Roundtable - Fluid Painting, Moving Canvas | Making Art in a Precarious World

Mortimer Chatterjee received his postgraduate art history degree from SOAS, London. Having worked in the UK with an important collection of Indian photography, he moved to India to pursue his interest in modern and contemporary Indian art. In 2003, he and his wife, Tara, began Chatterjee & Lal. Today based in Mumbai’s art district, the gallery program is focused both on the work of emerging artists and historical material. Over the last thirteen years, the gallery program has formed an important node in the city’s maturing art scene. Mort has been published widely in art publications and lectures frequently.

Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist and curator based in Bombay. Her book, The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altaf, combines an art historical perspective with a politics of culture approach (The Guild, Bombay, 2016). It presents for the first time an elaborate historical analysis of the little-known Progressive Youth Movement (PROYOM) of the 1970s. She was joint artistic director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012) and she co-curated ‘No Parsi is an Island’ (National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2016), which retrieves artistic positions that have been marginalised from canonical accounts of Indian art history. Her essays have appeared in various anthologies: The Curatorial Conundrum (Bard/MIT Press, 2016) and Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 (BAK/MIT Press, 2016). She recently edited the Raza Foundation journal Aroop -- 'Some things that only art can do: A Lexicon of Affective Knowledge', 2017.

"Beatrice Pediconi was born in Rome and studied Architecture in Rome and Paris. In 2010 she moved to New York where she currently lives and work. Pediconi’s recent exhibitions include Dimensioni Variabili, Z2O gallery, Rome, Italy (2017), Alien/Alieno, sepiaEye gallery, New York, US (2016), The Other View, Italian Women photographers 1965-2015, Palazzo della Triennale Milan, Italy (2016), Untitled at the Macro Museum, Rome, Italy (2015), Plumbing- Sequence VII-Real Time Video Art Biennal, Reykjavik, Iceland (2015), In 2008 she has won the VII Biennal of Experimental Art in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe, Asia and America and has been acquired by numerous public and private Museums such as La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Macro Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome and the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia amongs others. Her work has been published and reviewed in Italian and international magazines, including Il Giornale dell’Arte, Artforum, Harper’s Magazine and Art in America."

Navjot Altaf’s practice involves painting, sculptures, installations, video, and site-specific works that negotiate various disciplinary boundaries. Navjot works with people from different disciplines as well as with indigenous artists and community members on public art projects in Chhattisgarh in Central India. Her methodology ascertains the interactive aspects of collaboration, whereby the work emerges out of an extended dialogical interaction. Navjot has been participating in national and international artists’ residencies, and in seminars Including Anthropocene Curriculum at the House of World Culture,Berlin, (2014 and 2016). Apart from number of solo exhibitions some of her participations include, 'Landscape as Evidence : Artist as Witness' : KHOJ, New Delhi, India (2017) 'Stretched Terrains' : Kiran Nadar Museum of Art New Delhi, India (2017) ‘Why Not Ask Again’ : 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016) ‘Making Sense of Crisis - Art as Schizoanalysis’ : KHOJ, New Delhi, India (2015) ‘Dead Reckoning: Whorled Explorations’: second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale,Kochi,India (2014) among many more.