Arushi Vats

Bio

Emerging Critics Residency

For Phase 1, Eyebeam is partnering with Momus, an international online art publication and podcast, to support a paid Critical Writing Fellowship. The Fellowship will provide sustained mentorship, editing, art-publishing access, and artist/writer/editor network building to an early-career art writer or critic. The Critical Writing Fellow will engage with and respond to Eyebeam’s inaugural phase of its new Fractal Fellowship program, from October 2021–May 2022.
Attended by a close and sustained mentorship with writer and critic Nora N. Khan, and overseen by the Momus editorial team, this period of research, dialogue, and drafting will result in the Fellow producing a feature-length text in addition to other shorter-form pieces produced throughout. The Critical Writing Fellow will also play an important role in the documentation of Eyebeam’s Fractal Fellowships Phase One, and will work with the cohort and Eyebeam team on producing text that will serve to illuminate the process, shared learnings, and outcomes generated by the artists’ collective work together. The inaugural year of the Critical Writing Fellowship was highly competitive, demonstrating the growing desire for sustained mentorship in art publishing.

About our Inaugural Writing Fellow: Arushi Vats

The 2021-22 Critical Writing Fellow has been awarded to Arushi Vats, a New Delhi-based arts, literary, and culture writer. Vats astounded us with the clarity of her vision, the strength of her early publishing experience (including platforms such as MARCH: a journal of art & strategy, Alternative South Asia Photography, The Karachi Collective, and Critical Collective, among others), and the depth of her resonance with mentor Nora N. Khan. Vats discuss her ambition to write on art “as a site for both lyrical affinities and radical challenges.” In addition to publishing in cultural venues including LSE International History and Write | Art | Connect, Vats has published short stories and poetry in The Gulmohar Quarterly, Hakara Journal, and PIX Quarterly. She has also authored several curatorial essays, including for a volume titled The Constitution of India at 70: Celebrate, Illuminate, Rejuvenate, Defend, published by Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust in 2021.

For more about Arushi and to read some of her writing, please visit: https://www.arushivats.com/