YCP 2025
Mentors of the Programme
In Conversation with Sharlene Khan
9th August 2025 - 10:30 PM IST
We are honoured to announce that Sharlene Khan will be joining the Young Critics Program as a mentor for our upcoming session. This session is shaped around the theme of Visual and Textual Perception, drawing inspiration from Sharlene’s profound body of work and research.
It will serve as a key point of engagement for our fellows, offering space to reflect on how visuality, narrative, and embodied knowledge intersect with race, gender, class, and socio-political meaning-making.
Through her layered, reflexive approach as both artist and scholar, the session invites critical inquiry into the politics of representation and artistic practice as a method of resistance and world-building.
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Sharlene Khan is a South African visual artist whose work uses various postcolonial strategies to interrogate her South African heritage. She has exhibited internationally, including the Thessaloniki and Casablanca Biennales. Her writing on visual arts appears in various research and popular publications including Springerin, Manifesta, Contemporary-And and The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education.
She has been a recipient of the Rockefeller Bellagio Arts residency (2009), the African Humanities Post-doctoral Fellowship (2017), the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences Award for Visual Arts (2018), and was runner-up winner in the Videokunst Preis Bremen video art award (2015).
She has published three books on her work: What I look like, What I feel like (2009), I Make Art (2017), When the moon waxes red… Negotiating Subjective Terrain as an ‘Inside-Outsider’, an ‘Outside-Insider’ (2019). She is co-convenor of the African Feminisms (Afems) Conference, runs the Art on our Mind Research Project and the fortnightly Black Feminist Killjoy Reading Group.
She holds a PhD (Arts) from Goldsmiths and is Associate Professor at the Department of Fine Arts, Wits University, Johannesburg.
In Conversation with Saodat Ismailova
11th August 2025 - 7:30 PM IST
We are honoured to announce a special session with artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova, who will join the Young Critics Program 2025 with a screening of her work, followed by an intimate conversation exploring research, process, and storytelling. This session will align with our strand inspired by Jacques Lacan’s idea of the Imaginary Order, opening space to reflect on symbolic memory, ancestral inheritance, and the politics of the visible and invisible.
Saodat Ismailova is a leading voice of post-Soviet Central Asian contemporary cinema and art. Her films and installations delve into rituals, myths, and ecological memory, often centring women as carriers of ancestral knowledge across temporal thresholds. With an artistic practice grounded between Tashkent and Paris, Saodat’s work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, documenta fifteen, and major festivals and museums worldwide. She is the recipient of the Eye Art & Film Prize (2022), Pernod Ricard Nouveau Programme (2025), and the Art Basel Medal of Honour (2025).
Saodat will represent Davra, the Central Asia-based research collective she founded in 2021. Davra is dedicated to fostering intra-regional dialogue through curation, publishing, and knowledge exchange. It has participated in Documenta Fifteen, Survival Kit, the Lahore Biennale, and more.
In Conversation with Vid Simoniti
14th August 2025 - 10:30 PM IST
We are delighted to welcome back Vid Simoniti as a returning mentor for this year’s Young Critics Program. Building on the spirit of his previous session, this year’s engagement will align with the thematic axis of Cognitive Rehearsals + Ethical Questions.
The session will explore how artist-critics reflect through their own practices using a psycho philosophical lens, considering the intersections of ethics, cognition, and artistic process. We are also excited to possibly weave in the ethos of Vid’s podcast Art Against the World, inviting participants to engage not only with writing and thought-building, but also with forms of critical listening and dialogue.
Vid’s approach offers a grounded yet expansive entry point into the core inquiries of the program, offering space for philosophical excavation and collaborative exploration.
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Vid Simoniti is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Most of his recent research investigates the relationship between aesthetics and politics, from both philosophical and art historical perspectives.
His book Artists Remake the World (Yale, 2023) examines the role of contemporary art in democracies. His collaborations as writer and broadcaster include BBC Radio 3, Ukrainian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale and the Liverpool Biennial.
Vid Simoniti as a returning mentor for this year’s Young Critics Program. Building on the spirit of his previous session, this year’s engagement will align with the thematic axis of Cognitive Rehearsals + Ethical Questions.
The session will explore how artist-critics reflect through their own practices using a psycho philosophical lens, considering the intersections of ethics, cognition, and artistic process. We are also excited to possibly weave in the ethos of Vid’s podcast Art Against the World, inviting participants to engage not only with writing and thought-building, but also with forms of critical listening and dialogue.
Vid’s approach offers a grounded yet expansive entry point into the core inquiries of the program, offering space for philosophical excavation and collaborative exploration.
In Conversation with Oliver Ressler
18th August 2025 - 6:30 PM IST
We’re thrilled to welcome artist and filmmaker Oliver Ressler to lead a mentorship session within our Praxis Lab. This session will offer an immersive space of critical inquiry where participants, artist-critics, curators, and cultural practitioners will delve into their own practices through the lens of Ressler’s artistic practice.
Ressler’s work highlights forms of resistance, ranging from the mass civil disobedience of climate justice movements to anti-capitalist activism. Although his visualizations of alternatives to infrastructures dependent on fossil fuels may seem utopian, they are always grounded on present-day examples.
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Oliver Ressler produces installations, projects in public space, and films on economics, democracy, climate breakdown, racism, forms of resistance and social alternatives. He has completed forty-four films that have been screened at thousands of events of social movements, art institutions and film festivals. Ressler had comprehensive solo exhibitions at National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest; SALT Galata, Istanbul; LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Museo Espacio, Aguascalientes, Mexico; and Belvedere 21, Vienna.
He has participated in numerous group exhibitions—including at the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris—as well as biennials in Prague, Seville, Moscow, Taipei, Lyon, Gyumri, Venice, Athens, Quebec, Helsinki, Jeju, Kyiv, Gothenburg, Stavanger, and Istanbul. He also participated in Documenta 14 in Kassel, in 2017.
In Conversation with Maqaal Collective
20th August 2025 - 8 PM IST
We are excited to host a workshop on collectivity led by maqaal collective, a grassroots collective from Uzbekistan/Central Asia. The session will explore collectivity not just as a structure but as a method, drawing from maqaal’s own collaborative practice and shared histories. Through writing sessions shaped by poetry, re-reading, and rewriting, participants will engage with texts to reimagine beyond nation-states, opening a space for shared authorship and creative reflection. The workshop will foreground rethinking the past, present, and future through a decolonial lens, rooted in oral histories and collective cultural practice.
‘maqaal’ is a grassroots collective from Uzbekistan/Central Asia. Although they come from various parts of Uzbekistan with diverse backgrounds, what unites them is the aim to connect women\* from across the country in speaking up their experiences as a way of collectively rethinking and reimagining the past, present and future through a decolonial approach to field research, oral history, and collaborative cultural practices.
In Conversation with Naween Noppakun
31st August - 4 PM IST
We’re thrilled to welcome filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Naween Noppakun to lead a mentorship session within our Praxis Lab. This session will offer an immersive space of critical inquiry where participants, artist-critics, curators, and cultural practitioners will delve into their own practices through the lens of Naween’s cinematic language. Through conversations on glitch aesthetics, memory, and post-human intimacy, the lab encourages a reimagining of storytelling, rooted in affect, speculative imagination, and resistant media practices from South, Southeast, and broader Global South perspectives. Drawing inspiration from thinkers like Trinh T. Minh-ha, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, and Kodwo Eshun, this space blurs the boundaries between sound, image, body, and theory, placing Naween’s methodology at the heart of a transformative pedagogical experience.
Naween Noppakun is an award-winning Thai filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores memory, identity, and post-human intimacy through speculative and socio-political lenses. His latest short, Crazy Lotus, won the Tiger Short Award at IFFR 2024 and continues to garner international acclaim. With a background in live music and sound performance, his emotionally surreal, politically charged films merge sonic architecture with hybrid visual aesthetics. He is currently developing his debut feature film.
In Conversation with Tabita Rezaire
2nd September - 10:30 PM IST
We are honoured to welcome Tabita Rezaire as a mentor for the Young Critics Program 2025.
Tabita Rezaire is infinity longing to experience itself. As an eternal seeker, her path as an artist, devotee, yogi, doula, and farmer weaves healing arts and scientific systems through connections to the land, the ancestors, and the songs.
Her cross-dimensional practices envision network sciences – organic, electronic and spiritual – as healing technologies to serve the shift towards heart consciousness. Embracing digital, corporeal and ancestral memory, she digs into scientific imaginaries and mystical realms to tackle the colonial wounds and energetic imbalances that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits.
Tabita is based in French Guiana, where she is caring for AMAKABA @amakaba.
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In this session, situated within the thematic strand Parallax Games, we will explore the instability of meaning across technological, historical, and metaphysical planes. Tabita’s multidimensional practice offers a vital lens through which to investigate the slippages of perception and how spiritual circuitry, ancestral knowledge, and embodied memory can disrupt dominant logics and open pathways toward healing, connection, and speculative futures.
The session will unfold through a presentation or visual meditation led by Tabita, followed by a co-learning circle with our fellows. Together, we will consider how artistic practice can serve as a mode of inquiry, repair, and transformation.