Amarnath Praful
PROJECT ESSAY/2026
Seasick at the Museum: Notations and Sightings of Ocean as Method from the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Photography Collection
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AUTHOR/AWARDEE:
Amarnath Praful is an interdisciplinary practitioner and educator. Currently, he is a Faculty member at the master’s program in Photography Design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India. His artistic research practice explores photography, incorporating elements from performance, text, video, archive and found material. His pedagogical concerns are around contemporary photographic practices, many histories of photography in the subcontinent, Indian Ocean histories, intermedia image practices and Malayalam cinema studies.
JURY:
Duncan Forbes is Head of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He was previously Senior Curator of Photography at the National Galleries of Scotland, Director of Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and a Researcher in photography at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. His publications over the last decade include Provoke: Between Protest and Performance: Photography in Japan 1960/1975 (2016); An Interview with Lewis Baltz (2020); and Renegade: Photography in the Life of Lisette Model (2025).
Latika Gupta is Director at the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation and teaches courses on the visual and material cultures of the Himalayas as Visiting Faculty at Ashoka University, Sonipat. She has worked as a curator at the National Gallery of Modern Art and KHOJ International Artists’ Association and curated several exhibitions of South Asian and international contemporary art. Latika has published widely on art history, and has been co-mentor for the Curatorial Intensive South Asia programme (Khoj and Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan) from 2019- 2025. She was associate editor at MARG Publications from 2016–2020, and is currently part of the editorial collective of ‘100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object’, and an associate editor at South Asian Studies.
Pradeep Dalal is an artist and writer based in New York and Mumbai. He is currently Director of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in New York, and former co-chair of the Photography Department in the MFA program at Bard College (2015-2020). He trained as an architect before turning to art, and his work has been internationally showcased, including at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Buffalo; Oakville Galleries, Oakville; Sala Diaz, San Antonio; and Art Cake, EFA Project Space, Callicoon Fine Arts, and Murray Guy, New York. His photographs have been featured in Blind Spot, BOMB, Cabinet, Grey Room, Nueva Luz, Rethinking Marxism, and other publications. With Fia Backström, he co-authored Photography in the Sensorium (Dancing Foxes Press, 2021), and his artist book Bhopal, MP was excerpted in Chandigarh Is in India (The Shoestring Publisher, 2016).