The Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur (IITJ) and The Public Arts Trust of India (PATI) have partnered to create a unique Artist-in-Residency Program aimed at fostering transdisciplinary collaboration between art, design, technology, science, and digital innovation. The residency aligns with IITJ’s School of Liberal Arts (SoLA) and its vision to break disciplinary silos, enabling innovative and inclusive engagement.
Residency Features • The program provides the selected artist full access to IITJ’s campus resources, lectures, and expert faculty to enrich their practice. • It encourages collaboration with students and the broader Jodhpur community, emphasizing experiential learning and global citizenship. • Residents will create new work showcased during the **Jodhpur Arts Week Special Projects Edition (October 2024)**, a precursor to PATI’s flagship festival in 2025.
Key Commitments • Deliver public presentations and engage in teaching or workshops for IITJ students. • Participate actively in IITJ’s academic and social environment. • Develop an artwork for display during Jodhpur Arts Week.
Residency Details • 1 residency per year for 2 months
Previous Artist-In-Residence (Academic Year 2024 - 2025)
Kiraṇ Kumār
My residency at IIT Jodhpur has been seminal in rethinking the interplay of body and technology through both performative and plastic art practices. Working between various labs at IIT and the city's rich artisanal community, my residency has been very fertile, thinking through and working with technologies and technologists both new and old; from embroidery to embedded circuits; clay pottery to concrete poetry, wood carving and 3D printing; fragrances, sonorous metal bells and gears to silent clockwork mechanisms. With one eye on dance and another on mechanics, all these crafting processes come together in the making of a sculpture that embodies both the art and science of motion, to tell cyclical stories of times past and of those yet to come.
Bio
Kiraṇ Kumār (b. 1983) is an India artist, researcher, and writer whose work spans dance, critical historiography, and speculative computing. His practice is rooted in both embodied and conceptual explorations of yogic and tāntrik traditions, and he engages with the connections—or disconnections—between premodern and futuristic worlds through performance, writing, and visual art. His transdisciplinary projects are the result of long-term artistic research, delving into themes of embodiment, temporality, spirituality, and digitality. His embodied practice includes training in Haṭha yoga, Kaḷaripayaṭṭ, and traditional Indic temple dance and singing. Kumār's exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Singapore Biennial, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. He has received performance commissions from Festspielhaus Hellerau, Gessneralle Zürich, and Malmö Konsthall. His writings have been published by Archive Books, Performance Research Books, Transcript Verlag and K-Verlag. He has been awarded fellowships and residencies at prestigious institutions, including the Academy for Theatre and Digitality and Akademie Schloss Solitude. His ongoing research project, "Spi/ritual/Digital Complex" (2023-present), is supported by the Ministry for Culture and Science North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW), KunstStiftung NRW, Medienwerk.NRW, and Dachverband Tanz Deutschland.