ANNOUNCING THE RECIPIENT OF THE MASH FICA AWARD: SUPPORTING NEW MEDIA ART PRACTICE
FICA, in collaboration with MASH, is pleased to announce the Recipient of the first MASH FICA Award 2019, dedicated to supporting artists working in new media: Amitesh Grover.
The announcement was made on February 3 at the India Art Fair 2019, following which an informal session was conducted with the winner by jury member Sabih Ahmed. The open call for the MASH FICA Award 2019 was sent out in late September 2018 and we received applications from all over the country that included independent artists, photographers, designers, filmmakers, and media professionals. The Jury for the MASH FICA Award 2019 consisted of artists Shilpa Gupta and Ranbir Kaleka, Sabih Ahmed, Researcher, Asia Art Archive, Shalini Passi, art patron and Founder, MASH and Vidya Shivadas, Director, FICA.
The Jury was particularly impressed by the finalist proposals as they reflected each artist’s distinctive commitment towards exploring the broader context and operations of media and mediation today through their art practice.The Jury's selection of four finalists offers an index of the different tendencies opening up in the field of art today that engage with mediatic regimes through performative; research-based; object driven, and interaction-based approaches.
MASH FICA Awardee 2019:
After careful deliberation, the jury awarded Amitesh Grover’s project, titled ‘Missing Bodies | Quantified Self’ as the first MASH FICA Award for 2019. Grover’s project looks at the intimate interaction between body and technology in the age of institutional surveillance. He intends to look at the ‘missing body’ as one subjected to the new demands of profit and efficiency. Submitting his biometric data to ‘intimate technologies’ that trace and monitor his corporeal functions (such as fitbits, heart-rate monitors and GPS equipment), Grover intends to map out an affective regime enabled by contesting ideas of agency. The proposal plays with the boundaries between art, science and capital in using wearable tracking technologies to gauge a simultaneously technical and affective topography of the contemporary workplace. He intends to collate the data collected over the grant period into an exhibition exploring ideas of resistance as it manifests in the labouring body. This includes not only practical interventions in workspaces, but also insights and data collected from tech-engineers, psychoanalysts, medical experts and other professionals engaged in the microeconomics of data-centred anatomical studies.
The project is expected to manifest in different modes including a multi-media installation as well as a live, durational performance, the dramaturgy of which is developed from the data collected during the project. The outcomes of the project shall reflect upon the conditions of the data-industry by counterpointing conditions of value and work with leisure, anti-value, use and uselessness.
We wish him the best to carry out his work through 2019! With Mash Shalini Passi, Vidya Shivadas
