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Ali Akbar Mehta

I am a Transmedia artist, curator, and researcher, who creates immersive cyber archives that map narratives of history, memory, and identity constructs through a multifocal lens of violence, conflict, and trauma. Such archival mappings – as drawings, paintings, new media works, net-based projects, poems, essays, and theoretical texts, as well as performances both of bodies and networks – are rooted in posthumanist critical theories of making visible hegemonic power relations and silenced historical materialism. My ongoing doctoral research, tentatively titled ‘Practicing Online Performativity: Constructing Politically Conscious Archives for the Future’, is interested in exploring the performative relations between online archives and its users through the mediated interventions of Second Order Cybernetics, to create knowledge systems that outline a vibrant new political public sphere.

My work as performances, installations, and talks have been exhibited in galleries and alternative spaces in Mumbai, New Delhi, Pune, Helsinki, Tampere, Pori, Venice, Nova Gorica, Vienna, Fiskars, and Jyväskylä. Several projects, such as 256 Million Colours of Violence, Outsiders at Work, Ballad of the Lost Utopian Meadow, and Central Park Archives, exist as permanent ongoing online archives.

I am a co-founder, and co-Artistic Director (w/ Marianne Savallampi) of Museum of Impossible Forms, Helsinki, an anti-racist queer feminist project, a board member of Kiila ry, and pursuing my Doctoral Research in the Contemporary Art Department at Aalto University, Helsinki. I hold a BFA in Drawing & Painting from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, and an MA in Visual Culture, Curating, and Contemporary Art from Aalto University, Helsinki.