I’m an indigenous Dalit artist-curator from Bangalore, India working across text, film, video, sound, performance & computational arts. Drawing from my own identity (Adi-Karnataka), I’m engaged in the creation of speculative narratives and counter histories rooted in a range of gestural & conversational research methodologies, oral histories & community storytelling practices. Over the last three years, I’ve been developing a critical pedagogical & equity building framework titled Subaltern Futurism, a container for artistic & curatorial research, practice and the technological education of contextualised subaltern communities across multiple socio-geographic contexts.

Drawing from the anti-caste movement, its histories, organising principles and rooted within non-hierarchical ways of approaching artistic interventions within contested spaces, Okkoota offers to demonstrate ways of building equity within institutional thinking & programming by fomenting community engagement across a range of artistic, social, pedagogical and experiential outcomes. The conceptual framework of the project rests in the notion of the collective voice of the artists, practices, communities & range of inquiries that will inhabit the building over the course of two weeks. Thinking through what sonic signatures can be ascribed upon the surfaces of the building by the meeting of minds, bodies, rituals, languages and histories as they contend with the ever present remnants of colony, the violence of assimilation and seeking belonging in the face of overwhelming threats of erasure, these artists & cultural practitioners contribute to a collective voice that resonates from the inside out thereby signalling a significant moment of departure in the history of the programming of contemporary art spaces. - Vishal Kumaraswamy

Vishal Kumaraswamy is a Bangalore, India based artist and curator working across text, film, sound, performance and computational arts. His works draw from his own Subaltern Caste lineage and investigates a range of critical concerns around caste, race and technology. He often employs emergent and experimental technologies to create media-based works across both physical and hybrid formats.

Vishal has an MA in Photography from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. His works have been shown at The Research Pavilion in the context of the Venice Biennale, the Αthens Digital Arts Festival, CCS Bard, Vector Festival, The Royal College of Art, Furtherfield and Site Gallery. Some of his works are distributed by VIVO Media Arts (Vancouver). Vishal has previously been an artist-in-residence at the U.S. Consulate General Mumbai, Contemporary Calgary in Alberta, SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) in Toronto, Vital Capacities & videoclub in the UK. He is a recipient of the Australia Council for the Arts “Transmitter: Darwin x Delhi” grant and the Warehouse421 Artistic Research Grant (2021) and is a 2022-2024 Research Associate at the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry.

Vishal is the founder of the international artist collective Now You Have Authority, a collaborative practice through which he has curated exhibitions, residencies, and delivered workshops at Tate Modern’s Tate Exchange programme, Tanzfest Aarau and the Sluice Biennial. He also develops independent curatorial projects with a focus on contemporary South-Asian artistic practices and his most recent project the-lack-of was shown as part of the wrong biennale in 2020.