JK Paper Award for the Arts, 2024
6 July – 1 August 2024
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Exhibition at Anant Art Gallery, Noida
The JK Paper Award for the Arts: Propositions in Paper was founded in 2023 and is presented annually by Anant Foundation for the Arts in partnership with JK Paper Ltd.
The award is created with the intention of appreciating paper, not as background or support, but as an enduring technology and medium of expression in its own right. It invites artists to engage seriously and rigorously with its material, conceptual and historical possibilities. Through residencies, monetary support and exhibition of new work, the award builds a growing community of practitioners whose work expands what paper can do and mean.
Edition Overview
The inaugural edition of the JK Paper Award for the Arts, held in 2024, marked a significant step in aligning industry with contemporary practice. The open call invited emerging and mid-career artists in India engaged with paper across drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, mixed media and interdisciplinary explorations. Sandeep Suneriya was selected as the first recipient of the award, with Anshu Singh, Debojit Roy, Rutvi Vakharia and Sriparna Dutta receiving Certificates of Recognition. Their works were presented in a two-part exhibition at Anant Art Gallery, Noida.
The Winner
Solo Exhibition
Title: Of Aesthetic and Humanitarian Purpose
Curator: Shankar Tripathi
Dates: 6 July – 1 August 2024 · Anant Art gallery, Noida
“The work that I present is to provoke the viewer, giving them a chance to respond towards the virulent society of our times.” — Sandeep Suneriya
Born in the city of Surat in 1985, Sandeep Suneriya’s experiments with ink and paper have remained committed to an art of social purpose and historical change. Inspired by his everyday surroundings and the lives of those around him, his art introduces to us a dedication that constantly visibilises the many lives of the city—centred, or otherwise. Sandeep’s craft traces a remarkable line between the political and the aesthetic realm: he is concerned with the rules by which society lives—who is allowed to travel, where can one eat—personal questions that implicate as well instigate.
A virtuoso approach that exposes the industrialised, carceral, and exploitative assembly line of the state, Sandeep’s visual landscape—whimsically detailed and highly conspicuous—drops us behind interminable queues of people demanding decency and dignity. This is what makes Sandeep’s voice as an artist amplified. His fundamental motivation is to speak without language; to say without speaking. It is in his recognition of a duality that his art presents—the ability to concretely visualise a dramatic, cynical-yet-realist understanding of our lives, and to be able to make poetry out of it—that he becomes a conduit, a powerful agent of change. His prodigious talent leaves us with a remarkably unique work of art, as well as a lesson in politics.
Sandeep’s art details the ‘how’ of living our lives. With works like Life of Sound and Life Line City, we are introduced to a litany of postcards and train tickets that astutely document everyday life—in motion and migration; in sickness and health—through the calamitous waves of the Covid-19 pandemic. Revolting against the ironic/moronic calls of ‘Happy Journey,’ Sandeep’s visuality dignifies an overwhelming sense of fear and loss with love and determination rather than denial or perturbation.
In his torrid surrealism of objects and livelihoods, Sandeep whips our attention towards Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival—an arena of play, humour, and chaos that challenges dominant assumptions and liberates us with eccentricity; an upside-down world where the jester is king. Fighting the impotency and infection of discrimination and privilege, his artworks deny us any right to withdraw from the responsibility of arresting the never-ending cycle of suffering. It is a conviction that echoes Arundhati Roy from Power Politics: ‘The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.
Honourable Mentions
Four artists received a Certificate of Recognition from Anant Foundation for the Arts for outstanding practice, presenting new work as part of the group section of the exhibition.
Group Exhibition
Title- Propositions in Paper
Dates: 6 July – 1 August 2024 · Anant Art gallery, Noida
“That there abides in nature a certain pure matter, which, being discovered and brought by art to perfection, converts to itself proportionally all imperfect bodies that it touches.”
— Mary Anne Atwood, A Suggestive Inquiry Into Hermetic Mystery (1850)
As in the Aristotelian schema — on the theory of form, from his Metaphysics — of taking the substance of a thing, breaking it down to its form and analysing it into matter, layer by layer until the last residues of form have been brushed away to lay the prima materia bare, this exhibition posits paper as prima materia.
Propositions that are variously artistic, scribal, typographical, transcriptive across oral testimonies, sounds, sights as well as techniques activate the mediatic qualities of paper. The show touches upon the desire to probe into the emphasis paper lays on the relationship between material, tool and language, characterised by a chain of transferences between idea to notation, memory to notation, notation to transmission. How can this chain of transferences pin notative efforts within documentation, imagination, record keeping, and preservation in the line of accuracy and truth when the relationship of these very notions to information remains immensely convoluted?
Award Jury
Partners
Anant Art
Partner
JK Paper Ltd
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