Talk


Clark House Initiative: A Presentation by Nikhil Raunak

June 9, 2015
AAA in A, '09-'21

43 Remsen St. Brooklyn, NY

Clark House Initiative is a curatorial collaborative and a union of artists based in Bombay. Sharing a junction with two museums and a cinema, Clark House Initiative mirrors the fiction of what these spaces could be. It was established by Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma in 2010 as a curatorial collaborative concerned with ideas of freedom. The location was once an office of pharmaceutical research, an antiques store, and the shipping office of the Thakur Shipping Company that had links to countries in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Japan. Curatorial interventions in the space hope to continue, differently, these histories of internationalism, experiment, and research.

Nikhil Raunak, co-artistic director of Clark House Initiative, gave a presentation. He reflected on the ‘Workshop Model’, a method of working with public and regional institutions in India. This model was developed by Clark House Initiative with Anant Nikam at the printmaking studio of Sir JJ School of Art, and also acknowledged heritage from the workshops of the artist and pedagogue Krishna Reddy.

Nikhil Raunak (b. 1988) is a multi-discipline artist and curator who graduated in 2011 from Sir JJ School of Art (Bombay) in painting and printmaking, and currently co-artistic director of Clark House Initiative. Raunak is also founding member of Bombay-based artist collective Shunya. Shunya, meaning ‘void’, is used to define a mathematical concept of nothingness. The title explains a beginning from a point of neutrality. Shunya was formed in 2012. Raunak is a recipient of Inlaks Fine Art Award 2015 and participated in numerous exhibitions including ‘Arranging Chairs for Ai Wei Wei,’ ‘ICU-Jest,’ Kochi-Muzirius Biennale 2012, ‘we have arrived nowhere,’ Transnational Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2013, and ‘INSERT-2014 Mati Ghar’ New Delhi 2014.