Maithili Nitin Bavkar

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Explorations will delve into a world-building, exploring ‘aphantamophia’, as an artistic inquiry into a speculative future, where humanity loses internal imagery, ceding memory to machine, and the artistic process involves writing, filmmaking, and the making of physical artifacts, to investigate the transformation of seeing, knowing and technological dependence. Maithili Nitin Bavkar is the Coordinator for this project. 

Maithili Nitin Bavkar is an artist based in New Delhi, India, with an MA in Visual Arts from Ambedkar University, Delhi (2022), and a BFA in Painting from Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Arts and Crafts (2016), whose interdisciplinary practice is centered on the medium of text, which she explores across diverse forms including drawings, artist books, installation, photography, and video. She was named an Artist-in-residence for KHOJ PEERS 2025 and served as a Curatorial Fellow for the Kochi Biennale Foundation's Student Biennale in 2022. Her professional experience includes working as an Archives and Communications Assistant at the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (SSAF) and serving as an Artist Assistant for the late Vivan Sundaram. Her exhibitions and projects have been featured internationally and within India, including the solo exhibition Black Brides at Clark House Initiative, Mumbai (2018), the group show Chi chi in Sydney, Australia (2018), and a selection for Stories My Country Told Me at the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2016). Her most recent showcases include Into the Midst with Studio CAMP. Given her experience, Maithili Nitin Bavkar is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The project Dreaming without a Tailbone will be an artistic inquiry into a speculative future defined by 'aphantamophia', a slow, evolutionary cognitive shift where humanity has lost the ability to form internal visual imagery, following a girl who has never seen the sky and attempts to reconstruct it through technological tools,. Situated in New Delhi, the narrative will establish a reality where the role of external memory and imagination has been ceded entirely to machines, diminishing the necessity for internal visualisation. The film component of the exploration will track a girl attempting to reconstruct the sky, a sight she has never witnessed, using the technological tools available in her lifetime. The artistic experimentation is imagined as a world-building, leading to a multimedia installation featuring the film alongside a collection of physical objects and artifacts from this imagined future, including speculative photographs, diaries, and books. 

The artist plans to develop further chapters of the speculative film and significantly expand this world, including the creation of physical book prototypes, textual and visual artifacts, that will act as extensions of the film, deliberately existing as objects from another moment in time to reimagine the transformation of memory and explore the philosophical space between seeing and knowing. The artistic process hinges on speculative fiction to critically address contemporary dependencies on technology and the possible erasure of internal human imagination.

The outcome of the project will be world-building, experimentations with multimedia installation, involving film, writings, photography, or books. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be the audio-visual documentation of the artistic process, writings, films, or photographs.   

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it attempts to explore human neurological and phenomenological conditions of the technology-dependence of the present, through the imagination of a speculative future, where machines have replaced human neurological functions, addressing it through the politics of world-building as a form of artmaking. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm by convening an online gathering of artists coordinating Explorations projects. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees. 

This project is supported by Parijat Foundation.