Ali Akbar Mehta is a Transmedia artist, curator, researcher, and writer, creating immersive and interactive archives on the crossovers of culture, technology and knowledge. He experiments with new archival logics that depart from institutional and coloniality-driven legacy archiving, investigating narratives from conflict zones and power structures, and offering countermeasures to everyday experiences of violence, conflict, and trauma.

These archives, as open-source, antifascist, decolonial ‘knowledge systems’, mirror and challenge contemporary realities to foreground overlooked bodies, data, networks, and ecologies. They generate conceptualisatons of how narratives of history, memory, and identity may be mapped to make visible hegemonic power relations and silenced historical materialism. Such archival mappings – drawings, paintings, new media works, net-based projects, poems, essays, theoretical texts, and performances both of bodies and networks – create knowledge systems that outline a vibrant new political public sphere.

His current project purgatory Edit is an archival project shaped as a user-generated montage-based cinematic experience that highlights long-term and deliberate methods in which digital technologies enforce subliminal visual manipulation, sensory overload, data fatigue, psychological reaction, and ideological numbness.

His doctoral research at Aalto University, Practising Online Performativity: Constructing Politically Conscious Archives as Participatory Art in the Age of Data, Power, and Violence, investigates the (infra)structural and performative relations between online archives and their users. He frequently writes and lectures on museum-building as a critical artistic praxis and archiving as a site for Infrastructural Praxis through the lens of decolonial, queer-feminist, norm-critical diversity, and the socio-politics of borderisation.

His work as performances, installations, talks, and curatorial interventions have been presented at the Tate Britain (2025), Delfina Foundation (2025), transmediale festival (2025), silent green (2025), Helsinki Biennale (2023), documenta fifteen (2022), Tampere Art Museum (2023), Taide Museo ARTSI (2021), Gallen-Kallela Museum (2021), Ainola Museum (2021), Visavuori Museum (2021), Mänttä Art Festival (2021), ONOMA Summer Exhibition-Fiskars (2020), Galleria Saskia (2023), Myymälä2 (2020), Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum (2017), Venice Biennale Research Pavilion (2017), Third Space (2016), TAO Art Gallery (2011-2018), Galerie Mirchandani+Steinruecke (2010), Art Heritage (2010), among others. Several of his projects, such as purgatory EDIT, 256 Million Colours of Violence, Outsiders at Work, Ballad of the Lost Utopian Meadow, and Central Park Archives, exist as ongoing online projects.

His work has been awarded the State Art Prize by the Ministry of Art and Culture, Finland (2020) and the Tutkijaliitto-palkinto Award by the Finnish Association of Researchers (2019).

His curatorial works include HAIHATUS25, Helsinki Biennale 2023: New Directions May Emerge; he served as curatorial advisor to Southnord Artfest 2026 and Party Office B2B Fadescha for documenta fifteen. He is a co-founder of the Museum of Impossible Forms and was its co-artistic director from August 2018 to December 2020. He has held positions of accountability in several artist-led associations and institutional spaces in Helsinki. He is a doctoral researcher in the Contemporary Art Department at Aalto University, Helsinki. He holds an MA in ‘Visual Cultures, Curating, and Contemporary Art’, from Aalto University, Helsinki and a BFA (Drawing & Painting) from Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai.


Orcid Researcher ID:

ORCID iD iconhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-0098-4631


Ongoing Partners and Collaborators

Vidha Saumya | varialambo | Sanyam Varun | Pruthu Parab| Palash Mukhopadhyay | Jernej Čuček Gerbec | Anoushkaa Bhatnagar | Adnan Mirza | Aditya Rokade | Abhinit Khanna |

Museum of Impossible Forms | M-Cult | Party Office | Killa | Catalysti | GAP Helsinki

Supported by

Kone Foundation | Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) | Centre for Arts, Design, and Social Research | Finnish Cultural Foundation | Helsinki City |Finnland Insitut-Berlin | Goethe Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan-Mumbai | Finnish Institute in the UK + Ireland | Slovenian Ministry of Culture | European Union

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Projects

  • 2026
  • 2024
  • 2019
  • 2009
  • 2007