South Asian Digital Art Archive

As We Rise

As We Rise produces unfinished, unoccupied spaces as photomontages, with self-portraits juxtaposed with eroding structures of urbanity. The collages create dystopic visions of the subcontinent with corroding landscapes, environments, and political climates. Dreams.exe brings together emerging digital artists working across South Asia, who lend a glimpse into their imagined futures. Responding to Terrain.art’s open call, the artists included in this exhibition speak to the theme of ‘dystopia,’ drawing from the technocratic landscape that dominates our present against an environment of social isolation, informational overload, and urban and environmental degradation. The artists look to conditions of the digital present as we accelerate towards a future that seems to never arrive. The exhibition marks a milestone in Terrain.art’s commitment to building a supportive ecosystem and a Digital Marketplace that encourages new vocabularies of art. Artists featured in the exhibition are: Aditi Aggarwal, Aiman Verma, Anisha Baid, Annette Jacob, Joe Paul Cyriac, Moksha Kumar, Pranay Dutta, Prerit Jain, Sayak Shome, Subhojyoti Sen Sarma, Sudhir Ambasana, Sultana Zana, and Yasha Shrivastava. A Dream Inventory. A phone screen erupts into an endless scroll as graphic elements glitch and blur in a state of rapid motion. Celestial bodies swirl, with and apart from each other, at a galactic pace. Abandoned urban architecture is juxtaposed with the artist’s body, creating a simultaneous site under construction and demolition. Isolated, discarded objects placed in surreal combinations orchestrate a fiction in progress. Augmented wild animals placed in neighbourhood parks denote a shift in urban ecologies. Visions from a strange world emerge as fauna and flora morph into fantastical beings and landscapes. A machine generates poetry alongside a moving collage of sun-lit digital skies. Natural elements interact with the body, creating a symbolic space for the feminine. Analogous and digital, imagined and remembered; scraps of discarded informational output are combined into visual noise. A cloud burst occurs over a virtually generated, inhospitable environment. Eroded deco art buildings scheduled to be torn down morph into a new life. A conch shell questions a man on his presence in the Euclidean plane.

Year Published

2020-21

Type of Art

Mixed Media
Digital Illustration

Theme

Identity
Memory & Archives
Language & Post-Truth

Softwares Used

Adobe Photoshop

Audience

Everyone

Aditi Aggarwal

Aditi Aggarwal

Co-founder, Studio A 89

India

Aditi Aggarwal (b. 1987, New Delhi) is a visual artist whose practice spans painting, collage, bookmaking, and alternative photographic processes.

She is the co-founder of Studio A 89, Kaladham, an independent artist-led space in Greater Noida dedicated to painting and analogue image-making as contemporary forms of inquiry. Based in New Delhi NCR, Aditi’s work engages with materiality and experimental processes to question how images are constructed, layered, and remembered. She holds a PhD in Visual Studies from the University of Delhi and continues to combine practice, research, and collaboration in her artistic work.

You might also be interested