Amitabh Kumar Biography

Over the past few years he has been practicing the art of graphic storytelling and through it he has been exploring his relationship with space and time. He is convinced that there are other tropes through which the world could be charted, and his practice could also be seen as an experiment to locate them. These
experiments continue through structures, figures, strategies and styles in the comic book format and then try to play with narrative in a more non-sequential way. The attempt behind these 'composites' is to try and locate an affect that is part of an imagined comic book narrative, reconstruct the narrative based on that, and then collapse it over time and space into forming one meta-image, or a composite. Sequential storytelling, in this case, is a scaffolding on which the composite rests.

His body of work responds to the everyday and a specific charge that it carries through time. Being part of a city that has been loaded with imaginaries which speak to the human experience and history in a very pronounced way, his stories are about those tropes and the angularity that they recurrently produce. His
practice is not to represent those currents but to try and reproduce the affect that they produce in him. His medium though is one loaded with a history of representation, and this tension also informs his practice and the way he relates to story telling as a craft. The specifics of these stories are variable and are
based on a certain idea being mulled over by the artist at that point of time. These ideas are located across forms and media and the artist attends to them as projects.

The project that he has been currently working on is the "Projectile Prophecies" series, where a secret cult is playing out its mischief through drawings (both printed and fabricated) and sequential story telling. This project is being worked on simultaneously with the Paapi Nevla project, which is a documentation of
perverse graphic literature that the artist has been collecting through his travels in Delhi. He has produced events and has operated as a designer+researcher during his tenure in Sarai and is a visiting faculty to the Srishti College of Art and Design. The artist also operates in a curatorial capacity, having curated a year long experimental art space in Sarai-CSDS and an exhibition in the Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw , Poland.

He is working on a series of performances, a video, a few collaborations and a sculptural+spatial translation of his drawings.