JK Paper Award for the Arts, 2025
11 Oct – 8 Nov 2025
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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 second edition of the award continued to deepen its engagement with paper as a site of material and conceptual inquiry. Pritish Bali was selected as the winner, with Debashruti Aich, Ruma Choudhury and Sudeshna Nandi receiving Certificates of Recognition. All four artists undertook residencies — Pritish Bali at the Jaipur Centre for Art, Jaipur, and the three honourable mentions at Arthshila's Art Studios at Parivartan, Siwan — before presenting new work in exhibitions at Anant Art Gallery, Noida.
The Winner
Pritish Bali is a visual practitioner working across multiple media. Born in Amritsar, Punjab, he pursued his Bachelor’s in Applied Arts and Master’s in Painting from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. Pritish works with recontextualising images, text, and sound (both found and created) in his works, where his formal exploration into artmaking has been informed by questions of identity, reinterpretation of childhood memories, and familial relationships. He was awarded the Nasreen Mohammadi Scholarship in 2022.
Solo Exhibition
Title: Eternal Return | Pritish Bali
Dates: 11 October – 8 November 2025 · Anant Art gallery, Noida
"But my seeing body subtends this visible body, and all the visibles within it."
The image of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's subtended body mirrored Pritish Bali's early consciousness that the materialities of the world which feed perception also enfleshed his vision. This relationship of transference ensured that the subject could be articulated only by passing itself through the object on an endless loop of reciprocity. This anxiety emerged as sustained agony undergirding Bali's iconography — imagery that oozed from the tension lodged within the melding of the self and the other, the subject and the object, sameness and difference.
Bali abstracted this gap into the recurrent motif of an opening that was materially mutative and generative. Embodied by the works in his Form (2021–ongoing) series, the body was transmogrified into latex sculptures and large-scale charcoal drawings on paper. Bali betrayed a Nietzschean impulse in this sense, repeatedly going up against the ethical problem of the eternal return. However, unlike Nietzsche, repetition in Bali's universe was not a distant, metaphysical phenomenon but a close contemplation of existence marked by decay and labour. As Derrida wrote, "The eternal return is not the return of the identical. The return is marked each time, by the difference of a trace, the simulacrum of a return that has never yet occurred." In Bali's works, we found ourselves suspended in the opening of time, eluded by fixity, certainty or origin — haunted by the trace of what had been altered but appeared the same.
Residency at the Jaipur Centre for Art
Pritish Bali undertook his residency in April 2025 at the City Palace, Jaipur. There, he made a work titled 'मेरी महबूब कहीं और मिला कर मुझ से' — 'Meet me elsewhere, my beloved' — taking its title from a poem by Sahir Ludhianvi. Shown at the open studio above the palace's historic marble jaali in the balcony, the work was mistaken by many visitors for the carved architecture itself. Encountered at distance, it holds its disguise; encountered closely, hundreds of ants are visible slowly consuming the image, opening the work into questions that reach well beyond formal resemblance.
Honourable Mentions
Three artists received a Certificate of Recognition from Anant Foundation for the Arts for outstanding practice. They attended a group residency at Arthshila’s Art Studios at Parivartan, Siwan, and presented new work in a group exhibition at Anant Art Gallery, Noida.
Group Exhibition
Title: Propositions in Paper | Debashruti Aich, Ruma Choudhury, Sudeshna Nandi
Date: 11 October – 8 November 2025 · Anant Art gallery, Noida
“The world is always new however old its roots.”
This group exhibition brought together practices that moved like roots beneath the surface, drawing sustenance from the earth itself. The works leaned into the lyricism of nature writing where personal narrative was braided into ecological observation. What emerged was not a singular narrative, but an understory — a chorus of voices that moved between myth and memory, rupture and renewal.
The artists approached paper not as a static medium but as a living material — porous, absorptive, fragile, resilient. Mutualism became a method where memory and material pleached and entwined as though each gesture of making were an act of reciprocity. Stories of lament, endurance and renewal wove in and out of the exhibition, echoing rhythms of the natural world and its cyclical inevitability. One thinks of Ursula K. Le Guin's wisdom in reminding us that the past does not end, but continues to seed, regenerate and inflect what is yet to come.
Group Residency with Arthshila at Parivartan, Siwan
All four artists undertook residencies as part of the award. Pritish Bali attended a solo residency at the Jaipur Centre for Art, Jaipur. Debashruti Aich, Ruma Choudhury and Sudeshna Nandi attended a group residency at Arthshila’s Art Studios at Parivartan, Siwan. Both residencies included an exhibitionary component.
DEBASHRUTI AICH
During her residency, Debashruti continued her layered approach to drawing, printmaking, painting and textiles — working on rice paper while also experimenting with translucent fabric: painting with acrylics, then cutting and reassembling the pieces into fragmented, open-ended compositions. Her work brought together bodies, objects and local fauna — foxes, nilgai and others — foregrounding the interdependence between humans and the environment. For Debashruti, the presence of the human body in her work is essential: a reminder that humans are deeply implicated in the landscape and its systems of coexistence.
RUMA CHOUDHURY
At Parivartan, Ruma extended her ongoing practice of making handmade paper from found and discarded materials. Working with cotton waste from Arthshila’s in-house textile unit, she transformed the material into new sheets of paper that formed the basis of work made on site. The surrounding landscape became a direct subject: strong winds frequently knock over electric posts across the fields, sparking fires. These tensions between landscape, vulnerability and renewal — the forces that both sustain and threaten — are central to what she developed during her time in Siwan.
SUDESHNA NANDI
Sudeshna’s residency deepened and redirected her practice in unexpected ways. Discovering an abundance of masoor dal fibre on site, she pulped and repurposed it into a new material base for her work — extending her existing engagement with paper pulp as a medium that holds both fragility and resilience. Her time at Arthshila was also shaped by sustained conversations with local women and a close study of the visual motifs that populate their daily lives: small, significant markers of identity and resistance that she has since begun integrating into her practice.
Award Jury
Award Partners
JK Paper Ltd
Partner
Anant Art
Partner
Jaipur Centre for Art
Partner
Arthshila
Partner
