Ali Akbar Mehta
I create immersive transmedia archives exploring collective memetic history through narratives of memory, identity, violence, and conflict. I am a founder-member and the current Artistic Director of Museum of Impossible Forms; Artistic Producer at mcult Media Residency ; as well as pursuing doctoral studies at the Contemporary Art Department at Aalto University.
Violence and its perception are an unstable and contestable phenomenon shaped by social and material factors – a fundamental condition ‘lodged in the core of human experience’. It is simultaneously private, public, self-intimating, and collective. Although trauma manifests as a physical, emotional and psychological bodily sensation, its measurability, locus and description remain ambivalent. As an intangible concept, trauma is thus difficult to define, as it ‘has no referential content,’ and resists objectification in language. Since the experience and interpretation of pain is highly subjective, its representation translates invariably between individuals, societies and cultures. Its depiction or its narration then, has the potential to serve many symbolic and metonymic functions: as a document, a record, a vision, a fact, a possibility; which can be judged, critiqued, and understood within the context of its presentation.
Though my research based practice, I attempt to understand how the narrative experience of Violence, Trauma and Pain are embodied, embedded and extended in the contexts of these meanings. I find ways to confront the potency of a (post) conflict space in its basic vocabulary – to ensure narratives are not erased or rendered invisible.
- WAR • ROOM • ECHO: Regarding the Pain of Other Cyborgs
- Outsiders at Work
- 256 Million Colours of Violence
- Cyber Archive
- Purgatory Edit
- Contemporary Ruins of Kruunuvuori
- SOAK
- Pudding Manifesto for Togetherness
- TRINITY: Gordrej Legacy Park Silos
- SITE : STAGE : STRUCTURE
- Of Men and Supermen
- Luminous Matter
- Ballad of the War that Never Was, and Other Basterdised Myths
- To Whomsoever it May Concern
- Maunula Speaks
- Is the representation of violence also violent?
- (Un)Becoming Finnish
- Placebo Singers
- Tasher Desh
- Planktonian People
- We are such stuff As dreams are made on
- Rebirth
- Purgatory
- We are such stuff As dreams are made on
- Narrating WAR, Mymmälä2, Helsinki
- direct contact // feedback
- Narrating War, Museum of Impossible Forms, Helsinki
- Narrating War, Experimental Event VI – La Torre de Babel, Pori
- Narrating War, Carinarnica, Nova Gorcia
- Cyborg Archives: GarbageInGarbageOut, TIFA Working Studios, Pune
- Cyborg Archives: Can Archives Speak?
- Narrating War, Kaapelitehdas, Helsinki
- Narrating War, Clark House, Mumbai
- Narrating War, Pispala, Tampere
- Narrating War, Kallio Public Library, Helsinki
- Play the Space, Stupid!
- Limitations of Liability
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256 Million Colours of Violence
Third Space, Helsinki -
TRINITY: Godrej Legacy Park silos
Godrej ONE, Vikhroli, Mumbai -
SITE : STAGE : STRUCTURE
Clark House, Mumbai -
Of Men and Supermen
India Art Festival, by TAO Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2012 - Ballad of the War that Never Was, and Other Basterdised Myths, TAO Art Gallery
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No Corners
TAO Art Gallery, Mumbai -
Assembly of Access
TIFA Working Studios, 2018 -
OUT2
Research Pavilion: The Utopia of Access, Venice Biennale, Venice -
Partizaning Maunula
Maunulatalo, Maunula, Helsinki -
IS/NOT: Sculpture for the Post-Truth Era
Aalto University Learning Centre, Helsinki -
Ateria/ The Meal
URB 2017 + Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki, 2017 -
Space Invaders IV: Heterotopia
Espoo, 2016 -
SOAK, Illusia
Kalasatama, Helsinki -
Whose History is it Anyway?*
Aalto University, 2016 -
Immersion 2016
Former ADD LAB Space, Aalto University, Espoo -
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, -
April Salon
Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai -
Three New Voices: Dimensions in Time & Space
Art Heritage, New Delhi
- Cyber Archive: Questions
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An Ode to Erkki Kurenniemi
Essay by Ali Akbar Mehta - Narrating War
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The Inescapable Manifest Destiny of the Artworld Culture: Defining Art through the state of the Artworld today
Essay by Ali Akbar Mehta (unpublished) -
SOAK is a mixed use world
Curatorial Text by Ali Akbar Mehta -
Proposal for Pudding Manifesto
Project Proposal by Ali Akbar Mehta -
Proposal for Contemporary Ruins of Kruunuvuori
Project Proposal by Ali Akbar Mehta -
About 256 Million Colours of Violence
Artist Statement by Ali Akbar Mehta -
TRINITY: Past, Present, and Future
Artist Statement by Ali Akbar Mehta and Vidha Saumya -
Perfect Ghosts
A brief historical record of the Kruunuvuori Villas, by Ali Akbar Mehta - Why is an archive of wars required?
- Foreword: Artist's Note
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The Possibility of Alienation
Exhibition Essay by Sumesh Sharma – co-curator, Clark House Initiative, Mumbai -
SITE : STAGE : STRUCTURE
Artist Statement by Ali Akbar Mehta -
Odes and Inquisitions: Sino-Indian Connections in Recent Indian Art
Essay by Ryan Holmberg -
On Superheroes and Science fiction
Essay by Ali Akbar Mehta (unpublished) -
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 -
Transforming Myth
Artist Statement, 2010
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Saša Nemec: My Teenage Angst Never Faded, I Am Still Rebelling
Interview by OUTSIDERS AT WORK -
Abhinit Khanna : Make Memes not War
Interview by OUTSIDERS AT WORK -
Tuike and Simo Alitalo: All Ears are Equal
Interview by OUTSIDERS AT WORK -
To 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 2019 -
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, 2018 -
Cyber Archive: Being and Doing Knowledge
MA thesis, Aalto University, 2018 -
Cyber Archive: Archiving as a sustainable counter-hegemonic practice
Hakara Journal, (ed.) Ashutosh Poddar and Noopur Desai, 2018 -
Colours of Violence, AROOP III - Totems and Taboos
(ed.) Nancy Adajania, published by Raza Foundation, New Delhi, 2018 -
The Photons of Politics: Footnotes for a New History
RAB-RAB Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art, (ed.) Sezgin Boynik, 2017 -
Locating: The Museum of Impossible Forms
Kone Foundation Boldness Blog, 2017 -
Border Crossing: Reshaping the Agency of Struggle
Interview with Ranjit Hoskote, CuMMA Papers Publication Series, (ed.) Nora Sternfeld, 2017 - No one at the ceremony remembers to mention the artist
- Poems
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A Body Split in Two
International Gallerie, Journal of Contemporary art, issue 30, (ed.) Bina Sarkar Ellias, Mumbai
- In Conversation with Ali Akbar Mehta
- Not your Regular Archive
- What is the colour of violence?
- Shades of Violence
- Does violence have a colour?
- The Spaces Are Alive
- The BB Art Showcase: Ali Akbar Mehta
- Memory & the Maximum City
- Chinese Fortunes and other Mumbai Memories
- The Possibility Of Alienation – Ali Akbar Mehta
- Site Specific
- Interview
- Ali Akbar Mehta in conversation with Namrata Bhawnani
- Visual Disobedience
- Luminous Matter Press Kit
- Nothing is Mundane
- In A Liminal Age