Mumbai: Asia Society India Centre announced the awardees for the ninth annual Asia Arts Game Changer Awards India, which will take place on February 7th in New Delhi. The awards are an invite-only gala that take place during the India Art Fair; they bring together over a hundred guests from around the world, particularly from India and South Asia, including eminent artists, collectors, patrons, diplomats, heads of cultural institutions, and members of Asia Society’s board and advisory council. The awards are co-chaired by Sangita Jindal, Kiran Nadar, Pheroza Godrej and Radhika Chopra. RMZ Foundation is the lead supporter for the awards. This edition of the awards focuses on artists and art practices from India and Pakistan, with the guidance of guest advisors Nada Raza and Zarmeene Shah.

The awards recognise innovation and excellence in contemporary art practices from India and South Asia through four categories: the Asia Arts Vanguard Award, the Asia Arts Pathbreaker Award, and the Asia Arts Future Awards (India and South Asia). This year’s awardees are Anupam Sud, Shilpa Gupta, Jayeeta Chatterjee and Karachi LaJamia.

Anupam Sud will be receiving the Asia Arts Vanguard Award, which recognises senior visual artists who have pioneered contemporary art with their practices and have been educators, scholars or mentors to other artists, influencing generations of young practitioners and students of visual culture in India. Working mainly with intaglio prints, Sud fuses her knowledge of different intaglio processes with lithography and screen-printing. Her zinc plates breathe with a life, now suggesting the contours of a sculpture, now hinting at the warmth of oils. While her sympathies and concerns are often feminist, a recurring theme in her work is the common human predicament. Her subjects are often introspective and fatalistic existing in a world that is falling apart. As one of the founder members of GROUP 8 (1968), she and her printmaker colleagues worked to promote and sustain printmaking as an independent, expressive art form. Her work has been widely exhibited and appreciated. Apart from over a dozen solo shows all over the world, she has participated in many group exhibitions in cities in the US, UK, Italy, Korea, Switzerland and other countries. This award has previously been presented to Krishen Khanna, Arpita Singh, Gulammohammed Sheikh, the late Vivan Sundaram, the late Akbar Padamsee, Jyoti Bhatt, Himmat Shah, Nilima Sheikh and Jogen Chowdhury.

Shilpa Gupta will be receiving the Asia Arts Pathbreaker Award, which recognises the next generation of vanguards in the making - an established contemporary artist from India who has consistently experimented with standard conventions of medium, geography or discipline in recent years in their artistic practice. Her work engages with the defining power of social and psychological borders on public life, making visible the aporias and incommensurabilities in the emerging national public sphere in India, which include gender and class barriers, religious differences, the power of repressive state apparatuses, and the seductions of social homogeneity and deceptive ideas of public consensus enabled by emerging mediascapes. Gupta is known to, often, sensorially challenge her audience to occupy subject-positions of the ‘other’, even if temporarily, to initiate an empathetic understanding. Her work has been shown at MoMA, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, Devi Art Foundation, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Mori Museum. This award has previously been presented to Asim Waqif.

Jayeeta Chatterjee will be receiving the Asia Arts Future Award (India), which recognises an emerging contemporary visual artist or collective from India with a growing body of work that enables a deeper understanding of their region and cultural landscape to South Asian audiences and beyond. Her practice is characterised by a blend of printmaking, textiles, and embroidery. Her work explores the nuanced interplay between women’s external environments and their inner worlds, particularly within domestic spaces. Central to her art is the traditional Nakshi Kantha embroidery of Bengal, which she revitalises with a contemporary twist by integrating it with woodcut print. This fusion allows her to weave the stories of middle-class homemakers, reflecting the socio-economic and cultural narratives of the region. This award has previously been presented to Abir Karmakar, Benitha Perciyal, Prabhakar Pachpute, Vibha Galhotra, Sohrab Hura, Sumakshi Singh and Aban Raza.

Karachi LaJamia will be receiving the Asia Arts Future Award (South Asia), which recognises an emerging artist from the subcontinent who is building a body of work that articulates and explains a lived experience of their region and cultural landscape to South Asian audiences and beyond. Karachi LaJamia was founded in 2015 by artists Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani as a nomadic space moving outside the institution to explore new radical pedagogies and art practices. They have facilitated a series of site-specific courses and collaborative research projects to explore the intersections of militarism, climate crisis, indigenous dispossession, and knowledge production in Karachi. Their courses are developed in close collaboration with local organisations and activists to build solidarity with ongoing struggles around land, water and development in the city. With an emphasis on centering indigenous knowledges and genealogies of resistance, their projects have resulted in experimental publications, video works, scholarly texts, browser- based artwork, syllabi and workbooks, and an expansive archive of fieldwork.  This award, which now prioritises artists from South Asia, has previously been presented to Hamra Abbas, Jasmine Nilani Joseph, Sun Xun, teamLAB, Tiffany Chung, Yang Yongliang and Prasiit Sthapit.

"Across generations and geographies, our awardees examine life with keen eyes, the way we are in public and in private, identities that are voluntary and involuntary — the incredible diversity of their approaches to these questions is inspiring,” said Inakshi Sobti, CEO, Asia Society India Centre. “Their work explores what it means to be from South Asia, which is an important question for our future, and it’s wonderful to bring together a community that cares deeply about contemporary art and wants to celebrate these artists.”

Founded in 1956 by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, Asia Society is a nonpartisan, nonprofit institution with major centers and public buildings in New York, Houston and Hong Kong, and offices in Los Angeles, Manila, Melbourne, Mumbai, San Francisco, Seattle, Seoul, Sydney, Tokyo, Washington, D.C. and Zurich. The India Centre was founded in 2006; it is the only Asia Society Centre in South Asia and aims to encompass all of the subcontinent in its mission to bring together diverse perspectives on modern Asia and cultivate a nuanced understanding of Asia-Pacific affairs. To learn more about Asia Society India, head to asiasociety.org/india. To read more about the 2025 Asia Arts Game Changer Awards India, click here.