Category: Artist in Residence

Meet our Artist in Residence Rosanna Dean

Meet our Artist in Residence Rosanna Dean

 

Rosanna Dean is Artist in Residence at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2019. Following her degree show she was selected for the FBA Futures 2020, a survey show of contemporary figurative art and awarded a Live Art Development residency to develop the performative element of her work. She studied Old Master Oil Painting techniques under the mentorship of Maestro Michael John Angel in Florence, was artist in residence at the Florence Trust 2015-16 and was awarded EU funding to develop a body of work exploring the convergence of spiritual material practices. She exhibited at The Courtauld in 2018 where she was also invited to speak on ritual and spirituality in contemporary art practice.

Dean’s work explores arts’ intimate relationship with religion, and its role in disseminating foundational narratives that condition our beliefs about the world and structure our realities. Her work weaves together patterning and figuration and takes reference from divergent ways in which cultures represent the divine, as a way of understanding what constitutes the self, its interwoven relationship with the world and what it is that we believe in.

As ritual and transformation through embodied experience became increasingly prevalent in her art practice, she travelled to India to deepen her study of yoga and ritual, particularly Theyyam in northern Kerala, and Chinakkathoor and Kodungalloor Bhagavathy temple.

The trip initiated her research into goddess worship and led her to the Devimahatmya and Chandipath. To have a more embodied relationship with the text she began learning Sanskrit, which she found immediately affected her approach to art making.

Her experiences of Sakta Traditions and the relationships to women that emerge from it will form the basis for her work this year, where she will study visual culture, ritual practices, sacred texts and Sanskrit. Words and visual material will interplay and fluidly feed each other, with her body as the site of their convergence, and through the year she will attempt to understand her relationship to foundational cultural narratives that brought her to these specific places and situations in which she found herself. The intention is to create a body of work which will be exhibited alongside a publication at the end of the year.

Image Gallery: Kumbh Mela 2013

Image Gallery: Kumbh Mela 2013

Image Gallery: Kumbh Mela 2013

The OCHS’s talented Artist-in-Residence, Param Tomanec, has been busily documenting this year’s Kumbh Mela for us.

Param’s experience as a photographer and film-maker has been a great gift to the OCHS, supplying us with hundreds of images capturing the life of the Centre. Now he takes us to Kumbh Mela, one of the world’s great religious gatherings, where a reported 30 million pilgrims bathe at the rivers’ confluence on one day.

Click here to view the gallery.

Click here to learn more about our Artist-in-Residence programme.

OCHS gets first Writer-in-Residence

OCHS gets first Writer-in-Residence

OCHS gets first Writer-in-Residence

Young author, Prajwal Parajuly, has been selected as the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (OCHS) first Writer-in-Residence.

At 28, Prajwal’s first book, The Gurkha’s Daughter, a collection of short stories set in Nepal and among the Nepali diaspora, has been called “Crisp, inventive and insightful” by The Guardian. Of his own work, Prajwal says, “I wanted to give the world a taste of my culture, my world, my people. We have fascinating cultures, great stories, wonderful history, but much of our literature has been closeted because it has been written in Nepali.”

While at the OCHS he will be completing work on his first novel, Land Where I Flee, due for publication this year. Prajwal will also be blogging on life at the OCHS and giving public readings of his work in progress.

To quote Prajwal: “To have the time and space to work on my own writing while simultaneously being surrounded by discourse on the religion I was born into, and about which I know little, will be a wonderful experience. “

OCHS Director, Shaunaka Rishi Das said: “When Prajwal first came to us last year, it was clear that this is a young man of prodigious talent and an enormous future. It was immediately clear that this is someone whose work we would like to foster.”

The Writer-in-Residence programme is a part of the OCHS’s Artist-in-Residence programme, which supported the work of Param Tomanec, an exceptional photographer who has since gone on to become a film-maker.

Prajwal is from Sikkim, in India’s northeast. Recognised as a writer at a young age he moved to the US where he began work on The Gurkha’s Daughter. Following this he went on to complete a Masters in Creative Writing at Oxford. He has also served as Senior Editor of The Oxonian Review of Books and Senior Advertising Executive at The Village Voice.