Varunika Saraf
Varunika Saraf is an artist and art historian based in Hyderabad. In her large-scale paintings, Saraf draws upon a multitude of archival sources from (art history, newspapers, popular culture, etc.) to engage in a conceptual dialogue with the past and critically analyse the antecedents of a range of contemporary political and social issues, particularly the exponential rise of violence. Central to her practice since 2001 is the use of wasli, a surface created by the Mughal technique of binding together layers of paper.
Saraf holds a PhD in Visual Studies from the School of Art and Aesthetics, JNU. Her thesis, Souvenirs, Fakes and Heritage: The Making of ‘Indian Miniature’ (2017) examines pertinent questions about the historiography of paintings that are normatively labelled as “Indian miniatures” in the discipline of Art History, contemporary practitioners and circulation of paintings as souvenirs and fakes. In 2009 she completed her MPhil at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. She holds an MFA(Painting) from the Sarojini Naidu School of Fine Arts and Communications, University of Hyderabad and a BFA(Painting) from JNTU College of Fine Arts and Architecture, Hyderabad. Saraf has been the recipient of prestigious grants and fellowships such as the Amol Vadehra Art Grant (2016). In 2012 she was invited to participate in Encounters, Summer Research Academy at The Getty Institute in Los Angeles. She was also awarded Visiting Fellowship from the Max-Planck Institute, Florence (2008), The UK Visiting Fellowship, Nehru Trust for the Indian Collections, V&A Museum in London (2010-2011) and in 2012 she was the CWIT Visiting Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. Her research interests include– the history of Indian court painting, art and colonialism, the historiography of “miniature painting”, the dichotomy between arts and crafts, the social history of painting, art and violence, religious nationalism and its cultural manifestations. She is also the recipient of the Asia Society Game Changer Award (2023).
She has held three solo shows, Caput Mortuum at Chemould Prescott Road (2021), The Chair in the Cloud at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai (2010) and Tales of Our Times at Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi (2008). In 2023 she was invited to participate in the Sharjah Biennale Thinking Historically in the Present curated by Hoor Al Qassimi.