Past Programmes

The Foundation enabled young people to realize their potential by providing financial support for constructive projects which foster the growth of individual talent.

The Inlaks Foundation in partnership with Skowhegan offered a fully funded 9 week residency for an artist based in India to come to the US. 

The Skowhegan residency was an intensive nine-week summer residency program for emerging visual artists. Established in 1946, it seeks each year to bring together a gifted and diverse group of individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to art-making and inquiry to create the most stimulating and rigorous environment possible for a concentrated period of artistic creation, interaction and growth. 

Launched by Ashkal Alwan in Beirut in 2011, the Home Workspace Program (HWP) was a 10-month arts study program that enrolled 10-15 fellows per year. The program was open to artists and other practitioners from Lebanon and the world over to develop their formal, technical and theoretical skills in a critical setting, and provides enrolled fellows with feedback and resources to facilitate and support their art practice. 

HWP was initially developed to explore free, trans-disciplinary, critical models of arts education in Lebanon and the Arab region where education is mostly privatized. Moreover, it aimed to include a wide range of practitioners and guest teachers, all the while addressing geopolitical particularities, and existing conditions in art and the educational landscape. 

In partnership with the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, the Mahler & LeWitt Studios offered an artist or curator of Indian citizenship, the opportunity of a five-week residency in Spoleto, Umbria, Italy. 

The Mahler & LeWitt Studios is established around the former studios of stone sculptor Anna Mahler, daughter of Gustav and Alma, and the seminal conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, who both lived permanently in the town for many years. The residency program provides a focused and stimulating environment for artists and curators to develop new ways of working in dialogue with peers and the unique cultural heritage of the region. 

The Darling Foundry, in partnership with the Indian organisations What About Art? and Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, as well as with the Canadian organizations Tata Steel Minerals and the South Asian Visual Arts Centre, offered Indian artists under the age of 35 to conduct a two month creation residency in Montreal. Strengthening the links established since 2012 between Canada and India, the India Residency at the Darling Foundry allowed artists, local and international communities to share their respective visions, and contribute to a dynamic cultural exchange. Immersed in Montreal’s vibrant artistic scene, the artist in residence had the opportunity to take a critical look at the local cultural context, while in return promoting artistic practices that are under-represented in North America. 

The Darling Foundry aimed to be an alternative, professional complex devoted to visual artists and their supporters. With an outstanding architectural design, The Darling Foundry, located in an old industrial neighborhood of Montreal, offers various opportunities for research, creation, production, and exhibition. Its multifaceted spaces include room for private studios, residencies, workshops, art galleries, a restaurant and offices. 

In 2012, the Darling Foundry established its first India Residency Program to benefit artists and the community in order to confront ideas from far away. 

In 2013 and 2014, the Foundation along with Chatterjee and Lal, supported a two-month residency titled ‘Passing Through at CONA’.

CONA is an artist-run initiative that aims at creating an avenue for students, artists, designers, and professionals from different fields to come together. It intends to function as an ongoing mind space, a point of contact that kindles ideas, facilitates discourse, stimulating both thought and action. In a word, here is an place for ideas, perspectives, happenings and people to meet, where they can work, think, participate in activities and projects that encompass disciplines, genres, times and lives.

The residency was designed keeping in mind the specific roles at the various stages in a residency structure. It looked at the position of the artist, the residency, the funding body and the gallery in contemporary times and attempted to arrive at a functioning that is fluid and interwoven. It helped the artist disengage from inhibitions and thus enable dialogue with peers as well as seniors.

HH was an artist-run residency space established in October 2014 in Goa by artists Romain Loustau, Madhavi Gore and Nikhil Chopra.

HH was housed in an old Goan-Portuguese Villa in Arpora. It was home to several artists in transition from large cities in India as well from the international artist community, who visited and stayed for the space, time, and an increasingly critical audience. The essence of HH Art Spaces was to be a space for reflection, inspiration and creation; a place where artists could come together, meet, make and share their ideas, processes, experiments and collaborative efforts with each other and the community.

What About Art endeavored to make working spaces accessible to artists within Mumbai, and offer mentoring support, facilitate production and an immediate access to the Art network.

The residency is in the heart of Bandra, a lively neighbourhood of Mumbai, walking distance from many restaurants, pubs, and high street stores. They offer two artists studios above their office, as well as a comfortable shared flat with 2 bedrooms. The flat is a 5-minute walk from the studios and the WAA office. They also run a project space in their office premises. Their focus is on video art, with artists’ talks and art events.

TIFA was created to innovate and experiment within and outside of the existing educational ecosystem in India to provide resources, tools and processes to other institutions, art organizations and cultural communities. These are provided and shared through collaboration, documentation and archiving.

TIFA values discussion and collaboration, and offers inputs and mentorship to spark ideation, conceptualization, expression and meticulous execution of projects. They are always looking at new faculties and resources for the production and manifestation of a thriving field. They wish to become a node for a dialogue across media and linguistic affiliations in a trans-local setting.

Housed in the city center of Pune, in a 90 year-old art deco hotel, TIFA focuses on bringing contemporary and experimental art to the city.

Since 2010, Space118 provides five studios on a short-term basis (1–2 months) to artists as part of its commitment to supporting emerging art practitioners from all parts of the country and the world. They look at a diverse group of artists working in the studios to create a lively, supportive and dynamic working environment.

Located in the heart of industrial Bombay, a 15-minute drive from Kalaghoda and the art district in Colaba, artists have the freedom to experience the rich and cultural art scene on a daily basis. They encourage artists to have the freedom to develop their work at their own pace and interpret the studio term from their own perspective.

T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects is a residency program established in 2013 as a collaborative project between a visual artist and a gallerist. Intended as an interdisciplinary residency, it has already hosted visual artists, curators, academics, scientists, fiction writers and journalists. There is always one visual artist in residence. The residency program is also open to applicants from the fields of architecture, design, music, film, performing arts and education.

The residency has five studio spaces located in the center of Bangalore. Residents are provided with 24-hour studio access, wifi, a fully equipped kitchen, coffee / tea, and lunch (served daily). Talks, screenings and workshops are hosted in the space and at partner institutions.

Bengaluru Artist Residency One (BAR1) is a non-profit exchange programme by artists for artists to foster the local, Indian and international mutual exchange of ideas and experiences through guest residencies in Bangalore. The charm of this Residency Programme in Bangalore so far has been its personal and hands-on way of functioning. It has been run and conceptualized from within the local Bangalore artist community.

Sandarbh organises residency programmes, site-specific art projects and community-based interactions. It encourages the participation of local communities during these programmes, thus making them involved in the current art practices and helping them understand and accept ideas from around the world. In its own way, Sandarbh has taken contemporary art practices to places not explored earlier.

At a time when meeting and gathering in a physical space was almost impossible, the model of an online residency was extremely beneficial in many ways to the five Fine Art Awardees of 2020: Amrita (Rai) Barua, Swagata Bhattacharyya, Devika Sundar, Sandeep TK and Ankur Yadav.

While the physicality of exhibitions and seeing works in person was missed, the current world situation found ways to expand conversations beyond borders. This carried forward into this residency as the location of the speakers and reviewers did not in any way serve as a limitation.

The artists participated in group and personal sessions as well as workshop sessions which were conducted by Sohrab Hura,  Jitish Kallat, Vidya Shivadas, Farah Mulla, Sameer Kulavoor, Rohini Devasher, Ranjit Hoskote, Anshika, Arushi Vats and Hena Kapadia.

The residency was conducted between 22 February and 21 March 2021 by Veeranganakumari Solanki via Zoom, Google Drive and Miro Board.

The Foundation initiated a lab in Curatorial Studies with the School for Art and Aesthetics (SAA) at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi.

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), in collaboration with the Munshi Aziz Bhat Museum of Central Asian and Kargil Trade Artefacts and The Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, offered a Museum Fellowship to support a curator to explore innovative ways of presenting museum collections from a contemporary context.

The fellowship gave a curator the opportunity to engage with the historical collection at the ethnographic museum in Kargil, re-present the collection and experiment with different forms of visualization and design, related to the museum/exhibition space.

At the solo exhibition of Prabhakar Pachpute, held at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai, which was curated by Zasha Colah and Luca Cerizza in April 2016, the Foundation supported the discursive and educative programme of the show.

Since its inception in 2011, Critical Collective has collaborated closely with institutions in India and abroad to create exhibitions and seminars on art. In order to take its activities to a large scale, Critical Collective created a website, which works towards building knowledge in the arts in India. This website is intended to fill in the lacuna caused by the absence of publishing in the arts, a lack of reprints and a shortage of institutional infrastructure to support knowledge in the domain of the arts.

The website is based on the need for concerted editing and preservation of writing in the visual arts in India. It is also designed to address different categories which have virtually no significant writing at present, such lens based practices, video and photography. The Foundation was one of the initial sponsors of the initiative.

The Foundation supported an annual series of exhibitions at the Mumbai Art Room, featuring an emerging Indian Artist or an emerging Indian Curator.

A public charitable trust, Mumbai Art Room exhibited contemporary art, design, and visual culture from India and foreign countries. The organisation provided a non-commercial platform for artistic and curatorial practice, one that is experimental, educational, and as accessible as possible to all audiences. Working out of a storefront space centrally located in the arts district of Colaba, Mumbai Art Room was a non-commercial and non-profit organization.

As a part of the Khoj renovation project in 2012–2013, the Foundation contributed towards the creation of a large studio in the Khoj building in Khirkee village, New Delhi. The studio space is now known as the ‘Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Studio’.

The Foundation, in partnership with the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), Goldsmiths, University of London and the Raza Foundation, supported Indian student at the M.Res in Curatorial / Knowledge programme at Goldsmiths University.

The MRes programme in Curatorial/Knowledge takes place within the world’s only dedicated PhD programme for advanced contemporary curatorial research. It provides a profound grounding in a variety of relevant theoretical knowledge and offers a unique meeting ground for a network of internationally active curators. The MRes programme in Curatorial/Knowledge is a unique degree recognising that in order to function as a curator in contemporary globalized culture, one needs a far-reaching educational base, a range of diverse cultural references, and the ability to ask new questions.

The Foundation supported individual artists in various capacities.

The Foundation presented Blurring Boundaries, a Virtual Art Project with artists Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai, Amshu C, Sanket Jadia, Manjot Kaur, Salik Ansari and Tonoy Sarma in collaboration with Avid Learning.

The Foundation supported various artists at national and international art events.

The Foundation facilitated the practice of art writers, in collaboration with TAKE on Art, by awarding emerging writers the Inlaks TAKE on Writing Travel Grants.

The Foundation enabled aspiring musicians in the genre of Indian and Western Classical music in an effort to cultivate their talent.

The Foundation has supported young dancers and choreographers at residency programmes at various spaces.

In April 2007 the Foundation initiated another series of awards, The Inlaks Awards for Film and Television Studies,India. The award provided financial assistance to talented students at the Film and Television Institute at Pune, in three major disciplines: Scriptwriting, Acting and Television.

Concerned by the abysmal conditions and total lack of basic facilities at schools for girls in the poverty-stricken Sunderbans area of West Bengal, The Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation decided to provide assistance in the form of amenities like toilets and reading rooms for the students at these schools. These facilities were made to encourage outstanding students to not drop out of school and to continue higher education.

The Foundation had instituted scholarship awards of excellence at the IITs in India from 2003–2012 and supported 38 students.