T–A–J

Interdisciplinary project space in Bangalore, India

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TAJ Residents 2016: Shreya Oza

Shreya Oza is a fashion and textile designer based in Ahmedabad. Her work with textiles centers around innovation through sustainable and natural practices. In 2014, Shreya founded a fashion label called ASA that creates textiles using handloom and also explores alternative materials. She is currently exploring the making of paper fabric. She received a Bachelor degree in Textile Design from NIFT, New Delhi in 2012. She has shown at Amazon India Fashion week SS16 (2015) and Lakme Fashion Week Summer/Resort 16 (2016).

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TAJ Residents 2016: Annalisa Sonzogni

http://www.annalisasonzogni.com/

Annalisa Sonzogni is an artist and lecturer in Photography at Kingston University, London, UK. She works with photography and film in the field of architecture with a specific interest in site-specific installation. She received a Master degree in Photography from the Royal College of Art in 2008 and completed a practice-based PhD in 2015 at Kingston University in London. Her work has been exhibited internationally, such as Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan (2014), The C(h)roma show, Bangalore (2014), The Trampery London Fields, London (2013) Alkovi Gallery, Helsinki (2012) and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2009).

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TAJ Residents 2016: Lucy Pawlak

http://www.lucypawlak.com/

Lucy Pawlak is a visual artist and script writer living in Mexico City. Her most recent feature film, co-written with Joaquín Del Paso, will show at the Berlinale 2016. Pawlak was a member of the Lux Associate Artists Programme (London), she studied Cinematography at the Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School (Lodz) and Painting at the Royal College of Art (London). One day she hopes to quit speaking about herself in the 3rd person.

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India’s identity project is the the world’s largest biometric database -- currently consisting of almost 600 million enrolled. By locating this techno-utopian vision within the larger surveillance state that a unique identifier facilitates, Malavika Jayaram -- lawyer, Berkman Fellow, and Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore -- describes the ‘welfare industrial complex’ that imagines the poor as the next emerging market. She highlights the risks of the body as password, of implementing e-governance in a legal vacuum, and of digitization reinforcing existing inequalities. By offering a perspective that is somewhat different from the traditional western focus of privacy, she hopes to generate a more inclusive discourse about what it means to be autonomous and empowered in the face of paternalistic development projects.

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TAJ Residents 2016: Malavika Jayaram

Malavika Jayaram works broadly in the areas of privacy, identity, free expression and internet policy in India. A practicing lawyer specializing in technology law, she has a particular interest in new media and the arts, and has advised start-ups, innovators, scientists, educational institutions and artists. A Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, she follows legislative and policy developments in the privacy and internet governance domains. For the last few years, she has been looking at he evolution of big data and e-governance projects in India – particularly the world’s largest biometric ID project – and their implications for identity, freedom, choice and informational self-determination. As a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, she will explore the business case for protecting privacy and free expression in India, in the context of big data projects and threats to internet freedom.

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The Two Asian Americas - The New Yorker

A new book by Erika Lee explores how systemic racism has pervaded the Asian-American experience.

“In 1928, an Indian immigrant named Vaishno Das Bagai rented a room in San Jose, turned on the gas, and ended his life. He was thirty-seven. He had come to San Francisco thirteen years earlier with his wife and two children, “dreaming and hoping to make this land my own.” A dapper man, he learned English, wore three-piece suits, became a naturalized citizen, and opened a general store and import business on Fillmore Street, in San Francisco....”

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TAJ Residents 2016: Karan Mahajan

http://www.karan-mahajan.com/

Karan Mahajan is the author of the novels "Family Planning", a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and "The Association of Small Bombs", forthcoming from Viking USA, Harper India, and Chatto & Windus UK in 2016. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker online, The Believer, and other venues.

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Cover to Cover

People in Hindi movies don’t read many books. When you do see a character with a book, it’s often just another accessory: as meaningless as the brand of sunglasses they’re wearing, or the kind of sofa in their living room. Sometimes the book in a person’s hand seems incongruous—think of Nushrat Bharucha’s Chiku, the spoilt, … Continue reading Cover to Cover

“People in Hindi movies don’t read many books. When you do see a character with a book, it’s often just another accessory: as meaningless as the brand of sunglasses they’re wearing, or the kind of sofa in their living room. Sometimes the book in a person’s hand seems incongruous—think of Nushrat Bharucha’s Chiku, the spoilt, screechy caricature of an upper-class young woman in Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2, holding a copy of Marjane Satrapi’s plucky graphic novel Persepolis. Sometimes, though, book-spotting can be more fun, when the choice of title is meant to function as shorthand for a character’s personality, or as a sideways comment on a situation...”

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TAJ Residents 2016: Trisha Gupta

http://trishagupta.blogspot.in/

Trisha Gupta is an independent columnist and culture critic based in Delhi. She writes on books, films, photography and art, with a particular interest in twentieth-century South Asia. Originally trained as an anthropologist, she is endlessly fascinated by negotiations between tradition and modernity in her part of the world, processes of translation, and the politics of culture more generally. She tweets as @chhotahazri.

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TAJ Residents 2015: Unnikrishnan C

Unnikrishnan C. is one of the youngest artists to exhibit at the Kochi Biennale 2014-15 and a recent graduate of the Government College of Fine Arts in Thrissur, Kerala. Unnikrishnan was born into a family traditionally engaged in basket weaving in Pezhumpara in rural Kerala, His art draws heavily from his surroundings, especially the imagery he encountered at home. 

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