About

Ayesha Singh | Baaraan Ijlal | Gigi Scaria | Parul Gupta x Madhav Raman
Featuring: Collectibles | Shrine Empire for PRAF

The Edit is the first of what will become an ongoing series of fundraisers to support present and future programmes of Prameya Art Foundation [PRAF]. PRAF has so far functioned through its unique partnership model, which gathers like-minded institutions with shared goals to collaborate on each of our initiatives. Over time, as the lacunae continues to exist when it comes to support for critical discourse and non-commodifiable modes of art and exhibition making, the foundation feels that it’s vital to continue to enable commissions and other support infrastructure for artists and art workers. The Edit was conceptualised to raise resources to sustain our self-initiated programmes and future projects that are in the pipeline with the generous support of the artists’ community who believe in the work that we do. This year, in it’s first edition, Ayesha Singh, Baaraan Ijlal, Gigi Scaria, Parul Gupta and Madhav Raman have brought to us conversations on space and architecture that are extensions of their practice in the form of a series of limited editions of collectible work by each of them.

Artist Bios

Ayesha Singh 

Ayesha Singh’s (b. 1990, India) works question dominant perspectives embedded in our understanding of history, embodied by architecture and urban planning. Her site-specific responses consider how built spaces reflect the intricate politics inherent in nation-building exercises, reveal power dynamics, respond to migration and displacement, or function as a location of identity- embodying aspiration, desire, and belief.

Through research and critical spatial interventions, Singh works within gaps in cultural histories, including those that have long excluded women. Her work emphasizes collaboration and coexistence to unpack layers of alteration and the erasure of lived history through construction, restoration, and destruction. Singh's practice contains participatory performances with poetry, kinetic sculptures, sculptural line-drawings, video, graphite drawings on paper, and public installations of scaffold and images that are created with community involvement.

Singh has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including the Academy of Fine Arts (Vienna), Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (New Delhi), The Wolfsonian (Miami), Palazzo Madama (Turin), and Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK). Singh was recently awarded the Lui Shimming Art Foundation Grant, New York (2024), Cross-Hatchings: New Delhi-Perth Residency by Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) and Khoj, Perth (2024), Van Gogh House Residency (London, 2022) and Emerging Artist of the Year by India Today (2020). Her work has been written about in major publications around the world including Art Review, Art Forum, Architectural Digest, The Art Newspaper, Critical Collective, Wallpaper, and news media including The Guardian, recently, Singh’s work was recently included in Phaidon Press’ book titled 'Great Women Sculptors' (2024).

Baaraan Ijlal 

Baaraan Ijlal (b.1976) is a self-taught artist based in Delhi, who works with acrylic paint, sound, video, light, oral histories, archive, and resin installations among others. She completed her M.A from Bhopal, India. Driven by the loss of her grandmother’s house in Bhopal in 2014, Baaraan began obsessively photographing its remains and the streets of the surrounding old city as well as disappearing sites and their inhabitants in other cities. This journey culminated in the series ‘Hostile Witness.’ The series archives against erasure, explored through paintings of fragile buildings (in Bhopal, Delhi, Lucknow, Kolkata, Mumbai and Banaras); also their inhabitants, now cast out by time, bureaucracy, and development. Currently, Baaraan is exploring new iterations of ‘Change Room’, a travelling archive and a continuously evolving sound installation that has been live since 2018. ‘Change Room’ is about speaking out and becoming a witness through the act of listening. Birdbox (2016), is a bioscope on the inner lives of girls in rural North India. ‘Change Room’ has been exhibited at, Khoj International Artists Association, Delhi, India (2023), Language is Migrant curated by Anushka Rajendran at the 7th edition of Colomboscope (2022), Chintretsukan Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2019), CREAR conference, Kathmandu, Nepal (2019), Conflictorium Museum of Conflict, Ahmedabad, India (2018) and TENT Arts Space, Kolkata, India (2018).

Gigi Scaria 

Born in 1973 in a village in southern Kerala called Kothanalloor, Gigi Scaria completed a bachelor’s of fine arts at the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, and a master’s of arts at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. While he trained in the discipline of painting, Scaria has developed a cross-media practice that includes photography, installation, sculpture and video. His work explores issues of urban development, particularly in relation to migration, economic development and urban architecture. He is interested in the quality of social space in a drastically changing urban environment, with concomitant implications on psychological experiences. Scaria has participated in major curated exhibitions and biennales, including the Venice Biennale; Kochi–Muziris Biennale; Smart Museum, Chicago; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Kunstverein Frankfurt; Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai; Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; Kunsthaus Bern; Fredric Jameson Gallery, Duke University; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai; Videospace Budapest; Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, USA; Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur; and Lalit Kala Academi, Chennai and New Delhi. Scaria was a 2012 University of Melbourne MacGeorge Fellow and was awarded an Inlaks Scholarship in 2002. The artist lives and works in New Delhi

Parul Gupta 

Parul Gupta (b.1980) is interested in movement in architectural spaces as a generator of perceptual experiences, primarily through parallax and also in an exploration of geometry and light in those spaces. In her sensitive perception that is intuitively moved by the silent suggestions of shifting lights, shadows, events and perspectives, she essentially morphs space into a dynamic entity. Through her works, one can consider several scientific as well as perceptual registers of space- time at once, that get translated into site-specific drawings and interventions. In her site specific work, the site and its structural elements become active participants. The viewer leads the participatory role to decipher the experiential nature of the work. Her other works takes on a similar enquiry about the perception of the inhabited world in the form of drawing, sculptures, installations, photographs and recently through kinetics. Parul studied MA in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University (2011) and Bachelor in Commerce from Delhi University (2000). She was the winner of Sovereign Asian Art Award 2023 and has been shortlisted for Shergill Sundaram Installation Art Award 2019. She has had solo shows at Nature Morte (2021), Gallery Lakeeren (2014) and Exhibit 320 (2015). Selected projects include “When is Space?” at JKK (2018), “Let’s Proceed in Parts” at Instituto Cervantes (2016), “Sarai Reader 09” at Devi Art Foundation (2012). Her works are in collections of numerous national and international private and museum collections including Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Devi Art Foundation, Eight Foundation, Sovereign Asian Art Foundation. Her work has been featured in a variety of national and international publications including Artforum, Asia Art Pacific, Marg, FUKT, Art India, Arts Illustrated and Field Review: South Asia. More recently, her work has been on the cover of LP Record by “Christina Vantzou, John Also Bennett and Michael Harrison” by Seance Centre, Ontario.

Madhav Raman 

Madhav is an architect and urbanist. After graduating from the School of Planning and Architecture Delhi in 2001, he co-founded Anagram Architects with Vaibhav Dimri. Formally established in 2004, Anagram Architects is internationally recognized as amongst the top emerging practices in the world with a commitment towards delivering deeply contextual designs that encourage sustainable lifestyles.
Over the years the practice has garnered much international acclaim including a nomination for the Aga Khan Award 2010. Keenly involved in academia, Madhav serves on the advisory boards of Sushant School of Art & Architecture, the Pearl Academy School of Design and on the Area Advisory Board of Amity University, NOIDA. He also serves on the advisory boards of the Centre for Urban and Regional Excellence (CURE), and pucca.in, He has also served as a curator at the Indian Arch Dialogue (IAD) in 2018.

Installation Images