Tara Aliya Kesavan Indian, b. 1994
"I appreciated having a context for dialogue and interaction with fellow artists and practitioners. My conversations with fellow artists and practitioners offered useful perspectives on an existing body of work. Moreover, my mentorship sessions with Premjish Achari during the grant period were valuable, and I enjoyed learning about the range of practices within the cohort."
Tara Aliya Kesavan (b.1994, New Delhi, India) received an MFA in Integrated Media Arts, Hunter College, CUNY (2024) and an M.A. in Mass Communications, Jamia Millia Islamia (2017).
Her current body of work comprises paintings and ceramic-video sculptures. Drawing from public and personal records from the early decades of independent India, her paintings show women moving between the emerging offices, labs, and broadcast studios of a young nation and the intimate routines of domestic life. Using these sources as scaffolding, her paintings conjure moments and gestures that drift beyond the archive, leaning into her figures’ interior worlds. Their attentive presence — expressed through touch, focus, and careful acts of looking — carries into her ceramic-video sculptures, where screens are embedded into hand-built forms. Part interface, part vessel, they invite a softer, more tactile relationship with virtual worlds.
Her work has been shown at Transmitter, NYC (2024), UnionDocs, NYC (2024), Locust Projects, Miami (2022), and the Center for Performance Research, NYC (2023). She was awarded Culture Push’s Fellowship for Utopian Practice (2023). She works at UnionDocs, a center for documentary art, where she supports public programming and artist-led projects.
Tara lives and works in Goa, India.
Mentor:
Premjish Achari
Proposed Project:
Time’s Radiant Keepers
Project Overview:
Through her project, Tara converged archival fragments and material forms to reimagine women's lived worlds between the domestic, the professional, and the virtual, through canvas paintings, and sculptures involving visual media. Her body of works was displayed at India Art Fair in Delhi, 2026.
