Kirloskar Visiting Scholar in Painting

In 2013 Vikram and Geetanjali Kirloskar established the Kirloskar Visiting Scholar in Painting program with the goal of exploring, strengthening and developing dialogue that connects RISD with South Asia-based artists and practices. Each year Professor Dennis Congdon 75 PT and the RISD Kirloskar Advisory Group select established and rising scholars to give lectures, serve as guest teachers or lead longer residencies here.

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Huma Bhabha

Huma Bhabha and Painting Department

In addition to delivering a lecture about her evolving practice, the Pakistani-born maker met with graduate students in Painting to discuss inspiration, process and composition.
Chitra Ganesh

Chitra Ganesh and Painting Department

Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh discusses her work in relation to contemporary art and visual culture in India and South Asia, as well as her plans as the first Kirloskar Visiting Scholar in Painting.
Salman Toor

Salman Toor and Painting Department

Toor offers intimate views into the imagined lives of young, queer Brown men residing between New York City and South Asia. Recurring color palettes and references to art history heighten the emotional impact of Toor's paintings and add a fantastical element to his narratives drawn from lived experience. Taken as a whole, Toor's paintings consider vulnerability within contemporary public and private life and the notion of community in the context of queer, diasporic identity.
Asim Waqif: Strategies for Disruption

Asim Waqif and Painting Department

Asim Waqif's projects attempt to span architecture, art and design, with a strong contextual reference to contemporary urban design and the politics of occupying/ intervening/ using public spaces. Concerns of ecology and anthropology weave through his work, and he has done extensive research on vernacular systems of ecological management, especially with respect to water, waste and architecture. His artworks employ manual processes that are deliberately painstaking and laborious while the products themselves are temporary or even designed to decay.

He has worked in sculpture, site-specific public installation, video, photography and with large-scale interactive installations that combine traditional and new media.
Documentary Proof Which Leaves No Reason For Doubt

Pallavi Paul and Painting Department

Pallavi Paul leads a collaborative text reading and talks about her artistic practice.

The evening incorporates a participative performance: a collective reading, in morse, of the official file of a secret agent Noor Inayat Khan who worked for the SOE during WW2. The file has been reproduced on a 73-foot scroll—it hosts many provocations about the nature of history writing, story telling, time, and disappearance. The piece takes on a sculptural quality: it produces a sensation of being in a state of meditation and cacophony at once.

In her talk, Paul explores some of the philosophical ideas around formal non-fiction, cinema and the notions of truth. Drawing from a background of storytelling, filmmaking, and experimentation, her ideas push boundaries to explore new horizons and unravel new meanings and possibilities. For Pallavi, the medium of documentary becomes “resistance, possibility, a second horizon on which things can happen.”
Conversation: Rick Lowe, Julie Mehretu, and Shahzia Sikander

Rick Lowe, Julie Mehretu, Shahzia Sikander, and Painting Department

Pakistani-born artist and RISD alumna Shahzia Sikander, the Painting Department's 2016 Kirloskar Fellow, organized a lecture and conversation with Rick Lowe and Julie Mehretu (RISD MFA ’97) to discuss the cultural landscape from the 1990’s to present day and their part in shaping it. The friends developed a dialogue about artists supporting artists, collaborations, mentoring, and what lies ahead.
Ayad Akhtar: A Conversation

Ayad Akhtar, Shahzia Sikander, and Painting Department

On October 25, Pakistani-born artist and RISD alumna Shahzia Sikander, the Painting Department's 2016 Kirloskar Fellow, organized a lecture and conversation with playwright and author–and her frequent collaborator–Ayad Akhtar, at the RISD Metcalf Auditorium.