SPECIAL MENTION

Special Mention: Anuj Arora for the project, ‘Opera of the Puppets’

Anuj Arora has a postgraduate degree in Photography from Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communication, New Delhi.  His long-term project ‘Unsettled Identities’ documenting the lives of the displaced Rohingya refugees in Delhi has been published in the latest issue of PIX, titled Passages. Anuj’s works have been exhibited at Prameya Art Foundation and at the Auckland Festival of Photography by FORMAT. He was a finalist of TOTO Photography Award 2020. Anuj’s work has been published by various national newspapers such as The Hindu, Deccan Herald and Indian Express, amongst others.

Statement:
“Puppetry has already been a very old form of theatre and it keeps evolving, it keeps changing. When we think of a puppet, it is in the context of a theatre or theatre performance. But if we change that context from the theatre and put that puppet into the real world, the context or the character of the puppet can change.”

Special Mention: Ashutosh Shaktan for the project, ‘The Ministry of Truth’

Ashutosh Shaktan has studied Documentary Photography and Photojournalism at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover, Germany. He developed his long-term photo documentary project, ‘The Ugly Beverage’ on lives of tea-garden workers in West Bengal and Assam, under the Fellowship for Photography by the India Habitat Centre (IHC), New Delhi. His works have been published on national and international platforms like Lensculture, Bloomberg Businessweek, Al-Jazeera and The Caravan magazine, amongst others.Ashutosh has exhibited his works at the Visual Arts Gallery (IHC) and at the Riga Photomonth festival (2020). 

Statement:
“My project is about alternate effects and narratives like urban myths, hoaxes, rumors, fake news, groupthink and mass hysteria and how media and social media report and portray them  in a modern India…My intention with this project is to take an artistic research, to explore the short lives of these narratives, how they impacted the lives of people who were involved and how they actually affected our social reality.”

Jury:

1. Neha Choksi (Artist, Performer and Writer)

2. Naveen Kishore (Photographer & Publisher, Seagull Books)

3. Ho Tzu Nyen ( Contemporary artist and Filmmaker)