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Awardees 2021: Salman Bashir Baba and Savyasachi Anju Prabir

Meet Salman Bashir Baba and Savyasachi Anju Prabir, two of the five Inlaks Fine Art Awardees for 2021. The other three awardees, Anisha Baid, Gurjeet Singh and Maksud Ali Mondal were featured last week.

 The awardees see the world through kaleidoscopic lenses, each with a unique perspective, approach and response to the world around them.

Read more about them and their respective practices below.
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Salman Bashir Baba

Salman Bashir Baba is an interdisciplinary artist from Kashmir. His practice explores the concepts of memory, identity, conflict and power. Through his work he ponders over the liminal spaces that exist between, being and nonbeing, life and death in conflict ridden zones. He is interested in understanding the possibilities of human life in these liminal spaces. While he primarily creates drawings and installations, his also employs a variety of media and materials, such as coding, performance, sculpture, embroidery on shroud, found audio, video footages, photographs, drawn maps, scent, etc. in his performances and installations.

Salman recently completed his MA in Visual Arts from Ambedkar University, New Delhi and BA in Applied Arts from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He has participated in various art workshops and events. He has recently organised a workshop cum interaction programme for young artists with Yusmarg Collective in Kashmir.  

Savyasachi Anju Prabir

Savyasachi Anju Prabir has a BA in Film and Contemporary Arts from Srishti Institutte of Art, Design and Techonology, Bengaluru. In 2021, he will obtain his MA in Visual Anthropology from University of Muenster, Germany. Due to the recent pandemic the university was forced to delay his class’ graduation by a semester.  

Savyasachi’s interest as an artist, particularly filmmaking, began with him documenting lives he believed to be interesting and needed to be remembered. Since then his interests have evolved, and his practice now explores co-production and collaboration in order to raise questions on representation and identity through a multimodal and postcolonial approach.  

He is currently working on an auto-ethnographic film project with his grandmother to re-create his childhood home and rediscover his sense of identity and belonging. Although she believes the camera makes her conscious and “one can’t see reality”, Savyasachi believes that the film offers glimpses into her reality. It is at this threshold of real and unreal that time, memories, dreams and the effects they play on relationships are redefined. Together, his grandmother and he are looking for a new lens through which they can look at their past in ways that inform our future and create new spaces for everyone to do so. They wish to reinterpret the meaning of ‘home’ through an exchange of images and the making of this film.

 

Explore Further

The Inlaks Fine Art Award

Recognises upcoming artists to undertake independent work in India with a stipulation to attend a recognised Art Residency programme for four weeks during the year.