He has a Masters in Art & Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Over close to two decades, Abhishek has exhibited and performed widely, including at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Experiment Marathon (Serpentine Gallery with Reykjavik Art Museum), Kunstmuseum Bern, Bose Pacia New York, Science Gallery Dublin, MAXXI Museum Rome, GallerySKE Bangalore, KHOJ New Delhi, Kiran Nadar Museum, Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) Toronto and West Space, Melbourne. He has been a Charles Wallace scholar and an artist-in-residence in various residences, including Gasworks (London), Art Omi (New York) and SymbioticA, Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, University of Western Australia, Perth. Abhishek has also received multiple awards, including the 2011 Sanskriti Award for Visual Art.

Practice-based research informs Abhishek’s work as a contemporary artist. Some of his ongoing research interests are social histories of colonial science and the hauntology of cultural theories that have almost ceased to be dominant. Increasingly interested in performance while still ambivalent about privileging ‘liveness’, his recent series of intermedial lecture performances has traced unexplored connections between different historical conjunctures through marginal figures such as the amanuensis. Abhishek has also been developing two connected bodies of work: one around the astrophysicist and oppositional public intellectual Meghnad Saha and the other on Saha’s close contemporary, the statistician and planner, P.C. Mahalanobis.

Some of the units that Abhishek has recently taught include the following: (The Dawn of an) Infernal Night? (Final Year Project for undergraduates), a seminar on Art & Aesthetics for postgraduate students, and a workshop on visual thinking tools for Foundation students. In his pedagogic practice, Abhishek has often attempted to explore Critical Theory through the materialities of artmaking. As an extension of this approach, he has taught units that explore an art historically mediated understanding of studio practice. While guiding final year thesis projects, he has focused on creating a safe deliberative space that encourages students to articulate their developing practice by locating standpoints for critiquing the blinkered ‘common sense’ of their social milieu.