Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Practice Semester III

Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE)

November 28-29, 2025

The MA Contemporary Art Practice held its inaugural exhibition entitled, “drafting disorientations,” at 1ShanthiRoad last month. The two-day exhibition featured works of our seven second year students, aṇu, Devaki, eyeshaan, Krishnapriya (KP), Urja, Vaishali, and Vepa. On both days, the exhibition also had a live sound performance by aṇu as part of her art-as-research installation.

The exhibition title came from two sites of this past semester, namely, the ten-week-long studio on “Making Space for Art” facilitated by Sandip Kuriakose in the context of 1ShanthiRoad Studio Gallery and the five-week-long “Text and Textuality” research writing seminar led by Kush Patel and Anjali Sakleshpur at The Just Futures Co-lab. Underpinning both sites were a set of explicitly anti-colonial, anti-caste, and queer- and trans-feminist epistemologies that disoriented students’ art forms uniquely and to which they remained critically oriented. In particular, if Sara Ahmed’s writings in Queer Phenomenology (2006) served as a guiding text in the studio, it was the “Scholarly Dis-/Re-/Orientation” opening to the seminar that amplified students’ individual forms of thinking.

The coming together of texts and objects in this exhibition was a deliberate bringing together of the destabilized fields of power both as experienced within our bodies and through relations of art and self-production that the students found themselves continually reworking.

Our sincere thanks to Suresh Jayaram for being an active collaborator and host throughout this past semester—and to all the people who visited the exhibition and engaged with the works generously. The MA Contemporary Art Practice is open for Admissions 2026! To learn more about the course, please visit: https://srishtimanipalinstitute.in/academics-overview/programs-courses/2-year-pg-arts-program/contemporary-art-practice-ma/