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Ali Akbar Mehta

I create immersive cyber archives that map narratives of history, memory, and identity 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 datafeminist, posthumanist critical theories of making visible hegemonic power relations and silenced historical materialism. My ongoing doctoral research ‘Practicing Online Performativity: Constructing Politically Conscious Archives for the Future’, is interested in exploring the performative relations between online archives and its users through mediated interventions of Second Order Cybernetics, to create speculative knowledge systems that outline new political public spheres.

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, Turku, and Jyväskylä. Several of my 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 (2018-2020) of Museum of Impossible Forms, Helsinki, an anti-racist queer feminist cultural center, a board member of Kiila ry, and pursuing my Doctoral Research in the Contemporary Art Department at Aalto University, Helsinki. I hold a BFA (Drawing & Painting) from Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, and an MA (Visual Culture, Curating, and Contemporary Art) from Aalto University, Helsinki.