The Hidden Artist Initiative (HAI) is an evolving platform in Santiniketan dedicated to supporting individuals – particularly students and emerging creators – whose talents may fall outside traditional academic systems. Many of these young creatives possess extraordinary imagination yet remain overlooked in conventional art spaces. HAI works to change that by offering mentorship, community, and space to grow.
Founded by artist Surojit Biswas, the initiative hosts writing workshops with expert mentors, hands-on sessions with local potters, and collaborative projects with renowned Manipuri handloom artists. With a focus on experimentation across materials – including terracotta, bamboo, wood, metal, painting, and installation – HAI functions as a research-driven hub for nurturing and amplifying underrepresented voices in the arts.
Connected to this vision is Bhumi Kriya, a platform that unites contemporary artists with local artisans, musicians, and cultural practitioners. Through participatory sessions, public art, installations, and sound explorations, Bhumi Kriya encourages dialogue between heritage and contemporary practice, documenting creative processes to build an interactive library for learning and exchange.
HAI has recently partnered with the Bahurupi Artist Community, a collective of nearly 70 families in Shital Gram (Birbhum District, West Bengal), known for sustaining their lives through a unique blend of agriculture and performance traditions. In Santiniketan, this collaboration brings together artists, writers, videographers, poets, choreographers, educators, musicians, theatre practitioners, students, and local residents – working side by side under one shared creative space for the first time. In this conversation, Surajit Biswas will introduce his practice and discuss his role as an artist-organizer and how alternative creative ecosystems can spark new possibilities for the future.
Surajit Biswas is an alternative art practitioner from Shyamnagar, West Bengal. Growing up in a working-class family shaped his sensitivity to labour, community, and overlooked narratives – core themes in his practice. After technical training and early exposure to design, he pursued formal art education and completed his BFA (2012) and MFA (2014) in Painting from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University. He founded the Hidden Artist Initiative (HAI) in 2019 that supports artistic research and knowledge exchange for under-represented voices.
Based in Santiniketan, Biswas has exhibited widely, including at Emami Chisel Art Gallery, Ganges Art Gallery, Birla Academy of Art and Culture (Kolkata), Art Konsult and Lalit Kala Akademi (New Delhi), and Gallery Beyond (Mumbai). His solo exhibitions include shows at Prak-Sis Contemporary Art Association, Chicago, and MSU Gallery, Baroda (2017). He has also participated in major fairs such as the India Art Fair (2019), Affordable Art Fair Singapore (2016), Affordable Art Fair London (2018), and the AFF at MOG, Goa (2018). In 2019-20, Surajit presented his project ‘Memory Scape’ at Five Million incidents conceived by the Raqs Media Collective and the Goethe Insitut, Delhi (2019). Drawing remains central to Biswas’s practice – not simply as technique, but as a language through which memory, labour, materiality, and embodied experience
Respondent: Amrita Gupta (Art Historian & Co-director, CASP)
The program will be bi-lingual – in Bangla and English.
December 20, 2025 | 6.00 pm – 7.30 pm on Zoom | Open to all.
