Visual Arts- Ashoka University

17/09/2026

What if making is less about finding an answer, and more about discovering what a material has to say?

For artist Manisha Parekh, each material carries its own character and quiet resistance. It is through spending time with it, listening to it, and allowing the process to remain open that the work begins to take shape.

Join us for Being as One: Living as Making, Making as Living, a colloquium exploring the relationship between materials, movement, and the act of making.

🕜Friday, September 18 | 1:30 PM
📍Visual Arts Studio, Ashoka University (near sports block)

We look forward to having you in our midst.

15/09/2026

Last Friday, the Department of Visual Arts at Ashoka University welcomed artist and poet Mithu Sen for I Used to Be a Mountain… Shaped Like a River!, an unchronological journey through mediums, encounters, and radical hospitality.

Moving between drawing, poetry, performance, sculpture, and installation, Sen invited us to think about art and its often uncomfortable coexistence with the market. She spoke of language as something wonderfully unruly, and identity as a space of perpetual (un)becoming.

We are grateful to Mithu Sen for sharing her practice, thoughts and reflections with us, and to everyone who joined the conversation.

Here’s a glimpse of the afternoon.

There's so much more that we have planned for the coming weeks. Follow us, and stay tuned for further updates!

10/09/2026

09/09/2026

The Department of Visual Arts presents the Visual Arts Colloquium Series | Monsoon 2026

Join us this semester for an engaging series of conversations featuring a multidisciplinary lineup of contemporary artists, art historians, and practitioners. Together, we'll explore themes spanning identity and language, abstraction and materiality, visual storytelling, urban space, art and politics, and the everyday.

Venue: Visual Arts Studio, Ashoka University

Time: 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Colloquium Schedule:

11 September - Mithu Sen

18 September - Manisha Parekh

23 October - Shikhant S.

30 October - Gigi Scaria

06 November - Anupam Roy

20 November - Deepti Mulgund

Open to all students, practitioners, researchers, and art enthusiasts across and beyond the university.

Monsoon2026 IndianContemporaryArt VisualCulture

06/05/2026

The Department of Visual Arts is excited to invite you to its capstone thesis presentations!

Title: From The Horse's Mouth: The Folk Artist as Author
Speaker: Mihika Kulkarni (Philosophy Major, Visual Arts Minor)
Supervisor: Prof. Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi

From The Horse’s Mouth examines how “folk” is constructed in cultural discourse through assumptions of anonymity. Combining close textual analysis with exhibition and curatorial analysis, the thesis argues that artistic subjectivity and reflexivity have not been absence from folk traditions, but have often been obscured by the frameworks through which "folk" is institutionally written and represented.

🗓 8 May | ⏰ 11 AM–12 PM
📍 Zoom (link in

🗓 8th May, Friday
⏰ 11 AM - 12 PM
📍 Zoom
🔗 Zoom Link: Scan QR in the poster or copy: https://zoom.us/j/94569212493?pwd=5PjOW74RfZbw2zKfB667walm0EVR1S.1

See you!

(image credits: Sanuar Chitrakar, Calcutta Series, 2005, Vegetable Dye of Paper. Devi Art Foundation.)

06/05/2026

The Department of Visual Arts is excited to invite you to its capstone thesis presentations!

Title: Architectures of Survival: The Sacred Object, Contested Space, and the Cultural Biography of Madin Sahib Shrine, Srinagar
Speaker: Nylaa Ahmad (History Major, Visual Arts Minor)
Supervisor: Prof. Latika Gupta

Architectures of Survival examines the locked Madin Sahib Shrine in Srinagar as a site where sacredness is shaped over time through memory, architecture, and contestation, rather than something that can be administratively revoked.

🗓 8th May, Friday
⏰ 10–11 AM
📍 Zoom
🔗 Zoom Link: Scan QR in the poster or copy: https://zoom.us/j/94569212493?pwd=5PjOW74RfZbw2zKfB667walm0EVR1S.1

See you!

26/04/2026

DEPARTMENT OF VISUAL ARTS IN COLLABORATION with ARCHIVES OF CONTEMPORARY INDIA

Can an archive become more than a point of preservation?
Can it move beyond holding the past, and begin to open new ways of thinking, questioning, and connecting with the present?

At the crossroads of the political, the personal and pedagogy,
we invite you to join us in this shared conversation. 

Monday, 27th April - Tuesday, 28th April 2026

AC02-009 (LR) 

{end semester exhibition by the scholars of Visualising with the Archive/ Visual Arts Department}

Engaging with Archives of Contemporary India (ACI), the scholars delve into the dual role of the archive, serving as both a tool and a point of reference for shaping their artistic and storytelling visions.

Working with the Archive and its diverse collections, here scholars engage and negotiate their experience, research and learnings through visual storytelling through art, comics, video game, photography, music video, journals, interactive stories, picture books, flash mob and palimpsests.

 

The Archive acts as a space for engagement and inspiration. Deriving from its collections, this is a collective effort to declassify.

We look forward to your visit and interaction.

 

We would also like to thank the entire team at the Archives for extending their unconditional support through the semester.

06/02/2026

We are excited to invite you to an informal interaction on the study of public images in modern and contemporary India with Prof. Kajri Jain.

Title: "Images in Contemporary Indian Public Culture"
Speaker: Professor Kajri Jain, Art Historian, University of Toronto

🗓 10th February, 2026 (Tuesday)
🕠 1:30 PM
📍Visual Art Studio (near sports block)

This seminar session is an invitation to meet with art historian Kajri Jain (University of Toronto) to discuss questions of theory and method in art history and/or visual studies.

We will take as our starting point two recent texts that articulate and demonstrate her approach to the efficacies of images. Participants are expected to have read these in advance of the discussion and bring their questions and comments about these texts, as well as other related concerns, to the table. This is not a lecture but an opportunity for informal interaction.

The texts are:
1. “Publicity and Territoriality in Social Media’s Mise-en-Scène,” Borderlines (online journal) series on Technopolitics of the Global South.
2. Chapter 1: “Statues and Sculptors,” Gods in the Time of Democracy, Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

We warmly encourage interested students, researchers, and faculty to sign up for the seminar!