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Ali Akbar Mehta
Ali Akbar Mehta (b.1983, Mumbai) is a Transmedia artist, curator, and researcher, currently invited at Documenta(15) as part of the Party Office collective to develop a curatorial project called ‘Archive as Contemporary Object X’, focusing on archival logics, museum-building as critical artistic praxis, and the role of institutions within art and culture. His research-based practice experiments with creating archival rules that divert from institutional and coloniality-driven legacy archives. His practice seeks to generate new knowledge systems of how narratives of history, memory, and identity may be mapped differently. Such archival mappings, as drawings, paintings, new media works, net-based projects, poems, essays, lectures, and performances both of bodies & networks, have been extensively exhibited in India and Europe, most notably at Ateneum National Museum, TaideMuseo ARTSI, Gallen-Kallela Museum, Ainola Museum, Visavuori Museum, Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Venice Biennale Research Pavilion, XXV Mänttä Art Festival, Myymälä2, Third Space, Piramal Art Museum and TAO Art Gallery. His doctoral research at Aalto University titled ‘Practicing Online Performativity’ investigates infrastructural and performative relations between online archives and its users through mediated interventions of Second Order Cybernetics, to create knowledge systems that outline a vibrant new political public sphere. He is co-founder and co-Artistic Director (2018-2020) of Museum of Impossible Forms, member of PARTY OFFICE, founding member of MAS, a research member of the Cluster of Critical Artistic Research (CCARE), and currently serves on the boards of TKOK ry, and Frame Contemporary Art Finland. He holds a BFA in Drawing & Painting, Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, and an MA in Visual Culture, Curating, & Contemporary Art, Aalto University. His work has been supported by the Kone Foundation, The Center for the Promotion of the Arts (Taike), and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
Visual arts
Sculpture • Painting • Curating • Photography • Video Art • Media art • Performance art • Installation • Art theory / art history • Arts pedagogy • Other visual arts •
Performing arts
Performance art •
Special groups
Multicultural / diversity •
Other culture
Literature / non-fiction • Literature / poetry • Community art • Environmental art •
performance view, Narrating WAR, 2021
Region
Helsinki •
Communication language
English •
Website
www.aliakbarmehta.com