Ali Akbar Mehta (b.1983, Mumbai) is a Transmedia artist, curator, researcher, and writer. Driven by the desires of knowing and participating in the creation of an equal world, he creates immersive, interactive archival projects on the crossovers of culture, technology and knowledge. These archives investigate and offer countermeasures to forms of violence and conflict generated as everyday collateral. By examining narratives drawn from zones of conflict and dominant power structures, he foregrounds overlooked bodies, data, networks, and ecologies.
His practice experiments with new archival rules that depart from institutional and coloniality-driven legacy archiving. He generates new knowledge systems 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 – seek to 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 VR experience and cinematic installation 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 (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 decoloniality, queer-feminist praxis, critical diversity and socio-politics of borderization.
His work as performances, installations, talks, and curatorial interventions have been presented at the 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 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 work is supported by grants from the Kone Foundation, Arts Promotion Center Finland, the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Helsinki City, and the European Union.
He has been a co-curator of the HAIHATUS 25 exhibition in Joutsa, Finland, was a co-curator of the Helsinki Biennale 2023: New Directions May Emerge, and a curatorial advisor to 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 candidate in the Contemporary Art Department at Aalto University, Helsinki, and 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.
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Projects
- 2026
- 2024
- 2021
The war that is coming is not the last one, part I
WAR • ROOM • ECHO: Regarding the Pain of Other Cyborgs
- 2019
- 2014
What a Wonderful World
Mazgaon Interviews – Fakhruddin and Khateeja Merchant
SITE : STAGE : STRUCTURE
- 2012
The Superhero Series
- 2009
- 2007
Curatorial work
- 2026
- 2025
- 2024
HAIHATUS 25
- 2021
How to work together? Extended notes on collaboration
How to Work Together? Seeking Models of Solidarity and Alliance
Public Talk: Pauliina Feodoroff
Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities Spring 2021
- 2018
Cyber Archive
- 2017
- 2015
- 2014
- 2013
- 2012
- 2011
- 2010
- 2009
- 2007
Performances
- 2026
- 2025
- 2024
- 2021
Ballad of the Lost Utopian Meadow: LIVE
Narrating WAR / HABITAT 1
Performance-Installation, in collaboration w/ varialamboReciprocities
- 2020
Glitchverse
Souja/Shelter Festival 2020, (online)Narrating WAR, New Performance Turku, Festival 2020: Mobilities
Performance by Ali Akbar Mehta with varialambo
- 2019
direct contact // feedback
w/ Vidha Saumya, Pixelache Festival 2019: Breaking the Fourth wall, HelsinkiNarrating WAR, Mymmälä2, Helsinki
Performance Reading by Ali Akbar Mehta
- 2018
Narrating War, Experimental Event VI – La Torre de Babel, Pori
curated by Anna Jensen, Andrea Coyotzi Borja and Sanna Ritvanen, Valimo Hall of Palmgren ConservatoryNarrating War, Museum of Impossible Forms, Helsinki
curated by Vishnu Vardhani as part of Performance LAB VIINarrating War, Carinarnica, Nova Gorcia
Cyborg Archives: GarbageInGarbageOut, TIFA Working Studios, Pune
Performance directed by Ali Akbar Mehta, and performed by Luv MehtaniCyborg Archives: Can Archives Speak?
Performance directed by Ali Akbar Mehta and performed by Ganesh TotekarCongratulations, the Space is invaded: Now What?
part of Space Invaders VI, curated by Anna Jensen and Elisa Suvanto, Helsinki
- 2017
Narrating War, Kaapelitehdas, Helsinki
curated by Heidi HänninenNarrating War, Clark House, Mumbai
- 2016
Narrating War, Kallio Public Library, Helsinki
part of Chimurenga Collective's 'The Pan African Space Station', curated by Ahmed Al-NawasNarrating War, Pispala, Tampere
- Play the Space, Stupid!
Performance in Collaboration with Gabriela Gazova, Parsa Khamehkosh, Ragnar Rael, and Saša Nemec
- 2015
- 2014
- 2013
- 2012
- 2011
- 2010
- 2009
- 2007
Texts
- 2026
- 2025
- 2023
The Politics of Togetherness: Beyond the integration infrastructure of State and institutional apparatus
In Z. Karimi, et. al. (Eds.), Rethinking Integration. Volume 9, Migration Institute of FinlandThe Boycean double-bind: Exquisite Tension as a pedagogy of free play
At first glance, Exquisite Tension (2005) may look like one of Boyce’s most unassuming works. When viewing the 4-minute video work for the first time, one is confronted by an apparently casual rendition of a simple ritualised action, yet set in a scene with a combination of actions unfamiliar to us as an everyday experience. In it, the hands of the artist plait the hair of performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and curator Adelaide Bannerman, friends to Boyce but perhaps strangers to each other, where the latter is invited to be a stand-in for the artist during the recording of the work.
A tessellated life: Space Structures as a philosophy of perseverance
Rasheed Araeen is best known for his formal, geometric sculptures, often created from simple, sometimes industrial materials that renounce traditional sculptural hierarchies and compositional concerns. He has been an ardent advocate of postcolonial and decolonial positions as put forward in the magazine Black Phoenix (co-founded by Araeen in 1978–1979) and later in Third Text (founded by Araeen in 1987). As curator of the landmark exhibition “The Other Story” (Hayward Gallery, London 1989), Araeen has continually challenged knowledge(s) fortified through histories of coloniality and hegemonic discourses of Western modernism.
A rhythmic play of possibilities in time: Obliquo Policromo as a holder of existential potentialities.
Giorgio Griffa’s practice is one where what he may have to say is less important than what you and I, as viewers, may have to imagine. Griffa stated this unequivocally when he said in 1972, “I don’t represent anything, I paint”. His work has always sought to move beyond the prescriptive ordering of surface, intuitive marks, and exuberant colours, instead pushing to question the medium’s relationship with knowledge. Inherent in Griffa’s practice is a proposal that what a painting ‘is’ is not nearly close to what a painting ‘could be’ – a holder of existential potentialities, an engine of possibilities driven by its audience.
On the Edge of the Re(lation)al: Between and Beyond Cyber Realities
In Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás & Marianne Schädler (eds.), Beyond Matter, Within Space: Curatorial and Art Mediation Techniques on the Verge of Virtual Reality, by ZKM Karlsruhe and Hatje Cantz
- 2022
On Recognising the Moment of Hope: Speaking in Echoes with Hiwa K.
Ali Akbar Mehta interviews Hiwa K. on navigating the capitalistic system of art, ‘urgency’ of climate change and notions of homeland.
Who watches whom? Ruminations on power, gaze, and field through Pilvi Takala’s Close Watch
This review of Pilvi Takala’s Close Watch, exhibited at the Finnish pavilion of the Venice Biennale, seeks to question whether issues pertaining to embodiment and social intervention – and by extension, research conducted and artistic practice developed through it – can ever be free of the power relations implicit in the political, identity-driven understanding of society today.
Bearing Witness: Articulating an Archival Practice
- 2021
Touching/Transforming: Notes Towards Collective Critical Artistic Research Practices and Processes
with Bäckman, F., Close, R., Godin, M-A., Kallio-Tavin, M., Mehta, A. A., Qureshi, A., & Sadatizarrini, S., Research in Arts and Education, 4. Aalto University. ISSN 2670-2142Generating (An)Other Economy: Working Together at the Museum of Impossible Forms
Written as a contribution for the Impossible Reader 2020titled*, How to work together?* Seeking models of solidarity and alliance, published by the Museum of Impossible Forms in 2021
A longing for something written in memory: Library as Archive as Excavation Site
Kirjasto/ Library does not formally announce a thematic drive at its outset, but situates itself within an abstract idea ‘archiving’, or of what a collection, library, or an archive could be.
Cultural production and racism: How to challenge racist structures
in 'Rasismi, valta ja vastarinta' (Racism, power and resistance), (ed) Suvi Keskinen, (pub.) GaudeamusMuseum of Impossible Forms: Voicing the Margins
in 'Marginaaleista museoihin'. (From Margins to Museums), (eds.) Rastas, Anna & Koivunen, Leila, (trans.) Nurmenniemi, Jenni, Tampere: Vastapaino, FI
- 2020
Processing In-Between(ness)
in 'IN BETWEEN', HIAP summer Residency publication, (pub.) HIAP, Helsinki, FIThe Shape of Museums to Come
“The Museum of the Future was published in 1970. 43 contributions to the discussion about the future of the museum. 50 years later, a publication brings together 43 new contributions by international authors from museum practice, from theory, education, art and architecture. They create concrete visions of a museum of the future: confident and doubtful, critical, clearly positioned and subjective. What do visions of the future accomplish and what do they make impossible? How empowering or disempowering are speculations about the future for a change in the museum of the present?”
SAFE{R}: Evolving the Conditions for Collaboration
in 'Six years in the Third Space', Third Space, Helsinki (published online)Walkin the Portal
Curated by Vivek Chockalingam and Marialaura Ghidini, Walkin Studios, Bangalore.Who is Welcome? – Thinking Hospitality as Museum of Impossible Forms
Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 2, (ed.) Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela, (pub.) Archive Books, Berlin, in collaboration with Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Helsinki, FIA Cyber Archive of Questions
A Cyber Archive of Questions is an essay published in ‘cohabitant/mutants’, Restricted Fixations, issue one – an independent zine curated and edited by Renuka Rajiv.
- Akbar Padamsee 1928-2020: At 25, he was 25000
- 2019
Tuike and Simo Alitalo: All Ears are Equal
Interview by OUTSIDERS AT WORKAbhinit Khanna : Make Memes not War
Interview by OUTSIDERS AT WORKNotes for Radical Diversity
Saša Nemec: My Teenage Angst Never Faded, I Am Still Rebelling
Interview by OUTSIDERS AT WORKHow to be a hospitable without being a motel: Thinking Hospitalities
Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 1, (ed.) Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela, (pub.) Archive Books, Berlin, in collaboration with Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Helsinki, FITo Not Wait for the Archive: Home and Labour mired in the complications of Invisibalisation
Home Issue, Visual Culture and Contemporary Art Journal #5, (ed.) Saara Mahbouba, Paola Jallili and Else Lagerspetz, published by Aalto University, Helsinki 2019Atlas of Lost Beliefs (for Insurgents, Citizens, & Untitled Bodies)
Curatorial Text, written as part of Co-Artistic Directorship at Museum of Impossible Forms, Helsinki
- 2018
FOOD and Other Practices at the Arthouse
Visual Culture and Contemporary Art Journal #4, (ed.) Ali Akbar Mehta and Vidha Saumya, Published by Aalto University, Espoo, 2018Cyber Archive: Being and Doing Knowledge
MA thesis, Aalto University, 2018Cyber Archive: Archiving as a sustainable counter-hegemonic practice
Hakara Journal, (ed.) Ashutosh Poddar and Noopur Desai, 2018An Ode to Erkki Kurenniemi
Essay by Ali Akbar MehtaColours of Violence, AROOP III - Totems and Taboos
Contribution for Aroop, volume 3, Totems and Taboos
- 2017
The Photons of Politics: Footnotes for a New History
RAB-RAB Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art, (ed.) Sezgin Boynik, 2017Locating: The Museum of Impossible Forms
Kone Foundation Boldness Blog, 2017Border Crossing: Reshaping the Agency of Struggle
Interview with Ranjit Hoskote, CuMMA Papers Publication Series, (ed.) Nora Sternfeld, 2017
- 2016
Narrating War
- The Inescapable Manifest Destiny of the Artworld Culture: Defining Art through the state of the Artworld today
Essay by Ali Akbar Mehta
- 2015
No one at the ceremony remembers to mention the artist
Essay for Vidha Saumya’s exhibition 'No one at the ceremony remembers to mention the artist', Third Space, 2015Perfect Ghosts
A brief historical record of the Kruunuvuori Villas, by Ali Akbar Mehta
- 2014
Why is an archive of wars required?
War List CODEX
Artist Book 3: Kwan Tai Shek
Artist Book 1: Performers of Mazgaon
Artist Book 2: Daarukhana
- 2012
- 2011
Poems
A Body Split in Two
International Gallerie, Journal of Contemporary art, issue 30, (ed.) Bina Sarkar Ellias, Mumbai
- 2010
- 2009
- 2007
Talks & teaching
- 2026
- 2025
- 2024
The Nature of Information: Exploring the difference that makes a difference
Countering Archival Fascism: Moving from technopolitical regimes to technodiverse cosmologies
Where to start when everything is urgent – intersectionalities, priorities and empathy
Ec(h)o Effects: Conversations on War and Environment
- 2023
Curating Across Cultures
Cyber Realities, Hybridity, and the Users (of Archives), Aalto University, FI
Collective and community-based art practices and their political potential
Agonistic Intelligence/s (or another AI/s)
Archiving in the Age of Data, Power and Violence
read-write-modify
- 2022
Who Watches Whom?
The Politics of Curating
How to work together: tools and practices for transgressional collective work
- 2021
A small introduction to the history of art from the indian Subcontinent
Decolonisation in the arts and cultural fields
Artists Vidha Saumya and Ali Akbar Mehta: Recipes come together from resources - and we are not living in the world where everybody have the same resources
Central Park Archives: Access, commons and networks of care
Mobility and its Discontents
- 2020
Kuvan Kievat
Archives as Knowledge Systems
Towards a New Internet: In conversation with Palash Mukhopadhyay
Violence in Finnish Society: In conversation with Arvind Ramachandran
Digital Creativity and Entanglement: In conversation with Timo Tuhkanen
- Is there a room with just a colour? In conversation with Camelo Ramiro
CreaTures: Panel Discussion on Creative Practices for Transformational Futures
Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 2 Readings with Annet Dekker, and Susanna Ånäs and Ali Akbar Mehta
Central Park Archives - workshops
- 2016
- 2013
- 2012
- 2011
- 2010
- 2009
- 2007
Exhibitions
- 2026
- 2024
- After School: Tafaria Art Foundation
European Media Art Platform (EMAP) Residency
After School: Theira Commune
- 2023
Cruel Radiance
curated by Harri Palviranta and MarKo Karo, Backlight '23, Tampere Art Museum, Gallery Saskia, Photographic Center Nykyaika, and Gallery Koppelo, Tampere, FITechnologies of Critical Conscientization
- 2022
Abdication of the Geniuses
Into the Void
curated by Farbod Fakharzadeh, for Ars Pori 2022- Commonplaces and Entanglements VI
Locus of Control
curated by Abhinit Khanna and Anoushkaa Bhatnagar, House of Creativity, Mumbai, IN
- 2021
Data Vitality: Soft Infrastructures and Economies of Knowledge
Dipoli Gallery, Aalto University, Helsinki, FIReboot Me Softly ↻
19th edition of Piksel Festival, Bergen, NOCentral Park Archives, Maunulatalo
Installation produced by m-cult, Maunulatalo, Helsinki, FITo Err is Human
Mänttä Kuvataideviikot, curated by Anna Ruth, Mänttä, Jyväskulä, FITime Machine and Utopias: Longing, Living conditions, Homecoming
curated by Hanna Johansson, at the Ainola Museum, Visavuori Museum, and Tarvaspää Museum, FIReciprocities
- 2020
Is there a room with just a colour?
Myymälä2, HelsinkiThe Meadow
Onoma Summer Exhibition 2020, curated by Taru Elfving, Fiskars VillageCentral Park Archives sound walk
launch of the prototype interfaceMaunula Commons
A Tapestry of Time
TAO Art Gallery, Mumbai
- 2018
Assembly of Access
TIFA Working Studios, 2018To Participate in the Archive
- No Corners
TAO Art Gallery, Mumbai
- 2017
Partizaning Maunula
Maunulatalo, Maunula, HelsinkiOUT2
Research Pavilion: The Utopia of Access, Venice Biennale, VeniceIS/NOT: Sculpture for the Post-Truth Era
Aalto University Learning Centre, HelsinkiAteria/ The Meal
URB 2017 + Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki, 2017Limitations of Liability
- 2016
256 Million Colours of Violence, Exhibition
Third Space, HelsinkiImmersion, 2016
ex-ADDLAB Space, Aalto University, Espoo, FISpace Invaders IV: Heterotopia
Espoo, 2016Whose History is it Anyway?*
Aalto University, 2016SOAK, Illusia
Kalasatama, HelsinkiImmersion 2016
Former ADD LAB Space, Aalto University, Espoo
- 2013
Tagore Lost and Found
Curated by Bina Sarkar Ellias, IndiaBulls Art Gallery and Auction House, New Delhi- Small is Beautiful – II
TAO Art Gallery, Mumbai - Beyond the Canvas
Curated by Kalpana Shah and Sapna Kar, TAO Art Gallery, Mumbai, - Equilibrium
TAO Art Gallery, Mumbai
- 2012
Small is Beautiful
TAO Art Gallery, Mumbai- Of Men and Supermen
India Art Festival, by TAO Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2012 - SPACE 118
- 2010
April Salon
Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai- Three New Voices: Dimensions in Time & Space
Art Heritage, New Delhi
- 2009
Press
- 2026
- 2025
Trolls in the election campaign: Who protects us from fake news?
purgatory EDIT: A Multimedia Installation That Questions The Vocabularies Of Violence
Making the Invisible Visible
A crunching dream
New and last chances
- 2024
- 2023
- 2022
Helsinki Biennial 2023 is created together with five curatorial collaborators
Bearing Witness: Articulating an Archival Practice
- 2021
Mänttä's Fine Arts Weeks can give itself to the use of artificial intelligence - Man has a similar relationship to artificial intelligence as to God
Environmental anxiety is a phenomenon more than a hundred years old
Artists Vidha Saumya and Ali Akbar Mehta: Recipes come together from resources - and we are not living in the world where everybody have the same resources
Makkaraa pitelevä koira herättää Pariisin-ikävän Mäntässä
Ali Akbar Mehta & varialambo - Narrating WAR / Habitat 1
- 2020
Collecting Art in Archives: In Conversation with Ali Akbar Mehta
Mehta & Ånäs: Keskuspuisto-arkistot
The art of making art seen through the lens of serving and consuming food
- 2016
The Spaces Are Alive
- 2015
The BB Art Showcase: Ali Akbar Mehta
Site Specific
Interview: Memory & the Maximum City
Chinese Fortunes and other Mumbai Memories
- 2014
The Possibility Of Alienation – Ali Akbar Mehta
The Possibility of Alienation
Exhibition Essay by Sumesh Sharma – co-curator, Clark House Initiative, MumbaiInterview
Odes and Inquisitions: Sino-Indian Connections in Recent Indian Art
Hidden Histories of Mazgoan
- 2012
Visual Disobedience
- 2011
Nothing is Mundane
Dystopia and Urban Imagination
Luminous Matter Press Kit
- In A Liminal Age
Interview by Rahul D'Souza - Somewhere between Science and Subjectivity
Interview by Rahul D'Souza Not on Noah’s Ark, but on the Raft of the Medusa
Essay by Ranjit Hoskote, Mumbai, 2011- Comprehending Violence
Review by Abhishek Bandekar
- 2009
- 2007