The Image Complex: Photography, Vision and Belief in South Asia

Dr Deepali Dewan is the Dan Mishra Curator of Global South Asia at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. She is also the co-editor of the online, peer-reviewed journal Trans Asia Photography. Her research spans issues of colonial, modern, and contemporary visual cultures of South Asia and its diasporas, with a focus on art schools and craft knowledge, photography, and contemporary art.

Dr Sudeshna Guha is a Professor at the Department of History and Archaeology, Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence, Delhi-NCR. She researches on histories of archaeology, museums, and heritage-making, and on issues of materiality and visualisation. She is the author of Artefacts of History: Archaeology, Historiography and Indian Pasts (republished by Primus Books, 2026). Her next exhibition at DAG is on early commercial photography in India.

Dr Avrati Bhatnagar is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Iowa. Her research offers a gender history of colonial Bombay, examining how middle-class women’s everyday urban practices drove nationalist politics during the Civil Disobedience Movement, even as the freedoms they claimed exceeded the nationalist agenda itself. Her publications include the co-edited volume Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay, 1930–31 (Mapin/Alkazi, 2025) and work in History of Photography.

Rahaab Allana is a curator and publisher at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi. A Charles Wallace grant awardee and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society (UK), he received his MA in Art History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and was Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Visual Anthropology at University College, London. He is the founder of ASAP | art, the region’s first app for the presentation and discussion of contemporary visual cultural production. He has edited multiple critical publications on lens-based practices and meta-histories of the image.

Dr Ranu Roychoudhuri is Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University, and is a historian of modern and contemporary art, focusing on South Asia, photography, print history, intellectual histories, art historiography, and postcolonial studies. Her scholarship particularly nurtures archives, visual genres, artists, and life worlds that often slip through the cracks of history. She has published on the inherently global and cosmopolitan character of photography, underscoring its relationship with other media practices in the backdrop of British colonialism and India’s postcolonial condition, and recently co-edited Documenting Industry: Photography, Aesthetics, and Labor in India (Routledge, 2025).

Abhidha Niphade is a lawyer, writer, and founder of ARUNA Education Foundation. Her work explores the intersections of women’s rights, labour, and representation, drawing on her experience working with rural and marginalised communities in India. Through her writing and community-based practice, she engages with questions of visibility, agency, and social change. She regularly writes in Marathi on issues related to women, work, law, and society. She is currently a Charles Wallace India Trust and Alkazi Foundation for the Arts Curatorial Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Suchitra Vijayan is the author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India (Melville House, 2021) and How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (Pluto Press, 2023). An award-winning photographer, she is the founder and Executive Director of The Polis Project, a New York–based magazine of dissent. She teaches at NYU Gallatin and Columbia University, New York.

Tanvi Mishra works with images as a photo editor, curator, writer, and educator. Her areas of interest include rights and representation in image-making, refusal as visual strategy, and the notion of truth/fiction in photography. She was the Creative Director of The Caravan and on the editorial team of PIX, a South Asian publication and display practice. Mishra’s writing has been published widely, and her recent curatorial projects include exhibits in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Luxembourg, and France. She currently teaches at the International Center of Photography, New York, and is on the International Advisory Committee of World Press Photo.

P Sainath is the founder-editor of People’s Archive of Rural India — an independent multimedia platform that reports on the Indian countryside and publishes in 15 languages — and the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought (Penguin, 1996) and The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom (Penguin, 2022). Over four decades as a journalist and reporter, he has won more than 60 national and international awards. He photographs his own reports, and an exhibition of his images, ‘Visible Work, Invisible Women: Women and Work in Rural India’, has travelled across the country since 2001.

Amarnath Praful is an interdisciplinary practitioner and educator. Currently, he is a faculty member at the master’s programme in Photography Design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. His artistic research practice explores photography, incorporating elements from performance, text, video, archive, and found material. His pedagogical concerns are contemporary photographic practices, the history of photography in the subcontinent, Indian Ocean histories, intermedia image practices, and Malayalam cinema studies. He was a Curatorial Research Fellow at the Photography Department, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Munem Wasif is an artist, curator, and educator based in Dhaka. His work investigates themes of memory, place and identity, primarily through photography and video. He has been a co-curator of Chobi Mela since its eighth edition in 2015, and has curated major survey exhibitions for the festival. Together with Tanzim Wahab, he has also published two editions of Kamra, a Bangla-language anthology of essays on photography. Wasif was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin from 2020 to 2021. In 2023, he received the Robert Gardner Fellowship to pursue research on the critical history of indigo in Bengal.

Veeranganakumari Solanki is a curator and writer. Her research and curatorial practices explore themes of memory, storytelling, time, and the way exhibitions can shape how we experience and understand art. Solanki was the 2019 Brooks International Research Fellow at the Tate Modern and a Resident at the Delfina Foundation. Her recent curations include exhibitions at the Serendipity Arts Festival (2020–25); at NCPA, Mumbai; and at KAASH, Bengaluru. She has previously worked as a Programme Director at Space Studio and The Gujral Foundation. She is a Co-Director of the SqW:Lab Foundation and a committee member of the photography gallery at NCPA, Mumbai.

Anshika Varma’s practice engages with images, working with an interest in personal, collective, and mythical histories through the prisms of an artist, editor, publisher, and curator. She is the founder of Offset Projects, an initiative working extensively on creating modes of access and creation within the photographic language. With photography and book-making, she is interested in exploring the intricate relationship between memory and object as markers of one’s identity.

M Neelika Jayawardane is a writer and scholar. She is a Professor of English Literature at a university in the US, and a Senior Research Associate at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study. Her research and writing — both creative and scholarly — are informed by southern Africa’s history, and by the work of contemporary artists and visual worlds. Supported by an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, she is currently working on a book project on Afrapix, a South African photographers’ collective that operated during the last decade of apartheid.

Dr Suryanandini Narain is an Assistant Professor in Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research and critical writing focuses on photography, visual culture, and aesthetics. Her recent scholarly work includes co-editing Framing Portraits, Binding Albums: Family Photographs in India (Zubaan, 2024).

Alakananda Nag is a cultural entrepreneur, author, curator, and educator dedicated to uncovering forgotten histories and reimagining heritage for the present. She has been working at the intersection of image-making, archives, and cultural practice. Her first book, Armenians of Calcutta (2021) — a self-published book of photos, archive, and text — launched across India and in the United States. Nag is the founder and Artistic Director of Archival Matter — an organisation that develops new ways of engaging with underrepresented histories — and Absent Archives, a network and platform addressing archival silences through writing, publications, exhibitions, and community projects.

Varun Gupta is a Chennai-based photographer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of the Chennai Photo Biennale Foundation, a non-profit photography organisation based in India. He also founded Travelling Lens — a company that organised photography workshops and holidays in remote areas of India — and previously managed public exhibitions for Art Chennai. Gupta runs Photo Seva, a long-term project to make portraits of local communities across India. In 2023, he helped establish the CPB Lighthouse in Chennai, which allows youth to discover historical photography practices. Gupta serves as a collaborator and advisor to PHOTO Australia in Melbourne and the Belfast Photo Festival in the UK.

Chinar Shah is an artist based in Bengaluru whose work explores documentary practices through the screen — using it simultaneously as a tool and a site of photographic inquiry. She is the founder of Home Sweet Home Studio, a research and publication platform dedicated to investigating self-organised, artist-led, and curatorial projects across India. Shah is the co-editor of Photography in India: From Archives to Contemporary Practice (republished by Routledge, 2020) and currently teaches as an Assistant Professor at Vidyashilp University, Bengaluru. She was one of the curators for the Student Biennale at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2025–26).

Premjish Achari is a writer, filmmaker, and curator. He currently holds the position of Curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, where he has been part of the curatorial teams for exhibitions including ‘Nalini Malani — Of Woman Born’ (Magazzini del Sale, Venice, 2026) and Lead Curator of ‘Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters’ (Humayun’s Tomb Museum, New Delhi, 2025–26). He is also the founder of Future Collaborations, a platform dedicated to theoretically and politically informed curatorial practices. Previously, he taught art history and theory at Shiv Nadar University, Noida. He holds an MA and an MPhil in Arts and Aesthetics and Visual Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Sukanya Deb is a writer, editor, and curator, whose interest lies in the intersections of contemporary art, digital culture, technology, and their material propositions. She has worked extensively in the arts sector, generating and experimenting with infrastructures for support, collaborative exchange and dissemination. She established Purée Mag in 2024, to address critical positions in art and culture. Her writing has also been featured in prominent arts publications. She was a recipient of the Art Scribes Award, Experimenter Generator Grant, Khoj CISA Fellowship, and the India Foundation for the Arts 25×25 Grant. Since 2022, she has been Programmes Manager at Shared Ecologies, an initiative of the Shyama Foundation.