Letter from the Chair

Another wonderful year of arts at the Mittal Institute has featured talented Visiting Artist Fellows, inspiring exhibitions, and an engaging architecture conference!

In Fall 2023, the Mittal Institute hosted photographer Cop Shiva and visual artist Garima Gupta from India. Cop Shiva’s series “Street As Studio” captures the resilience of Bengaluru’s migrants. Garima Gupta’s “a/muse/um” documents a decade in wildlife markets across Southeast Asia.

Similarly, last spring, the Mittal Institute welcomed two artists from Pakistan, Amra Khan and Waleed Zafar. Amra Khan’s paintings explore queer identity in Lahore’s underground culture. Waleed Zafar examines South Asian identity and racial politics through archival imagery. You can learn more about their work and their time at the Mittal Institute in the pages of this book.

Connecting deeper with our Visiting Artist alumni, the Mittal Institute presented its first virtual exhibition, “Crossing Many Seas,” featuring works by Sudipta Das and Ishita Chakraborty, past recipients of the Visiting Artist Fellowship. This exhibit symbolized the journeys undertaken by individuals across the physical and metaphorical, navigating the complexities of migration, identity, and belonging. Viewers embarked on a deep and reflective journey of exploration and discovery.

On the Cambridge campus, the Mittal Institute co-sponsored a major exhibition, “HUM SAB EK” (We Are One), which emerged from Dr. Satchit Balsari’s research on the pandemic’s impact on the 2.9 million-strong Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India. The exhibition showcases the women’s responses and resilience, and, after Harvard, will travel to the Clinton Global Initiative in NYC and the World Bank Headquarters in Washington D.C.

Another major arts initiative this year was a landmark architecture conference, “Architectures of Transition –Frameworks and Practices in South Asia,” led by Prof. Rahul Mehrotra. The three-day conference, hosted by the Mittal Institute’s India office, brought together architects from the region to reflect upon the breadth of work undertaken in South Asia and provided a space for architectural discourse and innovation.

In the fall, we hosted Atul Bhalla as the Mittal Institute’s Distinguished Climate Artist in Residence, who engaged with faculty and students and presented his work documenting urgent climate change issues in South Asia.

We look forward to hosting the fall 2024 VAF, Saurav Ghimire from Nepal, and the next cohort in spring 2025; we are also planning to have our 2025 Distinguished Artist Fellow, Naiza Khan from Pakistan, on campus in 2025!

It is a pleasure to welcome new members to the Arts Council: Bharti Malkani and Gaurav and Falu Shah.

We look forward to what we have planned for the upcoming year and to your engagement with the Institute. We are very grateful for your support and hope to see you on campus in the year ahead!

Warm regards,

DIPTI MATHUR

Chair, Mittal Institute Arts Council