Curatorial Research Fellowship (2025) – Awardee

The Charles Wallace India Trust (CWIT), the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), and the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts (AFA) are delighted to announce the recipient of the Curatorial Research Fellowship (2025) for extended research at the V&A.

Amarnath Praful
Project – Photography: Ocean and the Empire

Amarnath Praful’s project investigates the inextricable link between Indian Ocean studies and the material, sociological, representational and labour histories of colonial photography in the subcontinent. Focusing on three distinct and interconnected sites – the port as a portal; the ship as icon, architecture, spectacle and metaphor; and the seascape as absence/erasure of the political, Praful hopes to examine 19th and 20th-century photographs of India in the V&A collections, considering ocean as a method.

Amarnath Praful (b. 1992) is a teacher, visual artist and writer primarily working with photography. His artistic and research practice explores elements from performance, text, video, archive and found material. His work is often guided by the landscape, folk and oral traditions, modernities, and cultural and political histories of Kerala, India. His pedagogical concerns are in the area of contemporary photographic practices, the history of photography in the subcontinent, Indian Ocean studies, intermedia image practices, and cinema studies. He is currently Faculty at the Photography Design Master’s programme at the National Institute of Design, Gandhinagar.

We want to thank all the eminent jury members – Pradeep Dalal (Director, Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant), Latika Gupta (Director Projects, Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation) and Dr. Duncan Forbes (Head of Photography, V&A) for their time and expertise.