Offset Projects

What does it mean to live within the echoes of a shared space? Weaving through intricacies of the real and imagined, the books featured in this presentation offer glimpses into voices engaging with ideas of inheritance, history, rebellion, and the negotiation of one’s memory. In this context, bookmaking becomes a gateway to access worlds embedded in the subconscious—emerging from our realities and flowing into film, sculpture, drawing, and the moments of play and acts of mapping that shape them.

To fold, paste, and turn the page is to imprint yourself and your existence upon the memory of paper—a way of connecting and finding common ground through storytelling. Molding the book itself to locate the experience of reading is at the heart of the deep and intimate relationships that manifest on these walls and shelves. It is in the resonance of these encounters that the book finds its true place.

A Shared Room by Offset Projects is a program that highlights works and processes from the growing community of artists engaged with our ongoing exploration of how relationship-building can be centered in the practice of publishing.

The Reserve Ridge Forest in New Delhi, part of the ancient 1500-million-year-old Aravalli Range containing quartzite rocks and innumerable indigenous and medicinal plantations, is a vital green belt for the capital, protecting it from desert winds of neighbouring states. The Wall is a mixed media book exploring how natural environments influence our sense of being within urban spaces. It reflects on the fragility of urban city forests, questioning whether we see nature or culture when observing a landscape. The project views the forest as a repository of memories and obsessions of those who engage with it. Through photographs taken across different seasons, combined with intimate text, it encourages readers to view the forest not as a mere commodity to preserve, but as a living relationship. The images are connected to the visual landscape described in the authors’ memories, fostering a deeper connection with nature.

Artist Bio: Anshika’s practice engages with images as an artist, publisher and curator. She works with image-making and its dissemination to explore personal, collective, and mythical histories, focusing on the emotional connection between individuals and their environments. With photography and book-making, she is interested in exploring the intricate relationship between memory and object, ideas of inheritance and of loss. She likes to exist in the inbetween-ness of being, creating spaces that do not conform to absoluteness of thought but fluidity of the body and collective growth of an individual through shared spaces. She is the founder of Offset Projects.

Guft-gu: / गुफ्तगू  / گفتگو

noun Conversation

Edited and Curated by: Anshika Varma

Editorial Team: Moakshaa Vohraa and Radhika Iyengar

Designers: Ananya Khaitan and Kaashvi Kothari Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm

Published by: Offset Projects

Editions: 2020, 2022

Language: English, Malayalam, Nepali, Tamil, Urdu

Hard Case Cover deconstructed photo-book featuring chapters by 10 contemporary

practitioners from India, Nepal and Pakistan.

Featuring artists in the exhibition:

- The last time by Cheryl Mukherji

- They live where they take seed by Nandita Raman

- Ahmadis of Pakistan by Nida Mehboob

- Stay home, sisters by Uma Bista 

Guftgu looks at the interrogations and practices of 10 contemporary photographers in South Asia presented as individual chapters designed in context to each artists’ practice and process. The works featured inquires on identity formation and history building through perspectives of gender, caste and inheritance among many others. The works incorporated in this curation expand on a growing visual language and offers a complex study of the region through personal responses by photographers to their contemporary climates.

There has been a series of social upheavals from the Hong Kong political movements in 2014 and 2019 to the COVID-19 pandemic in the past decade. Hong Kong has undergone drastic changes. Personally, I have experienced the fear of death during my mother’s fight with cancer and the joy of childbirth. Days by days, children grow and we age. We are one step closer to farewell and death. Time may forward in a linear direction but memories do not. Fragments of my childhood with my mother often jump into my mind when I spend time with my son. It has not always been easy with my mother. I love her most of the time but sometimes I do not. The love-hate relationship with her mimics my relationship with the city and I do not want to carry it on with my child. Love is difficult but we love nevertheless.

Artist Bio: Iris Sham (b.1985, Hong Kong) is an artist with a cross-disciplinary practice based on photography and food. Sham's works were presented in Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Canada and the United Kingdom. She has participated in the Hong Kong International Photography Festival 2010, Dali International Photography Exhibition 2013, Lianzhou International Photography Festival 2013 and the ‘Big Bang Wagner’ at the Taipei Arts Festival 2013, Peer to Peer UK/HK 2022. She held her solo exhibitions in Hong Kong in 2014 and 2020. She was selected to participate in Yumi Goto's photobook workshop in Hong Kong International Photography Festival 2023. Her photographs have been featured in the photobook 80±, in Ming Pao, Hong Kong Economic Journal and the magazine published in Mainland China Be Water Journal.

“The city is not a map”, is an attempt to describe my idea of Delhi as an unsustainable/uninhabitable place to make home. A city in a state of constant disrepair, changing, crumbling, disintegrating.

“The Lost Pleiades” is an iteration of the abridged story based upon my experience of living in Hamburg, Germany for three months in 2022.

I work with maps and the idea of mapping to reflect upon the role of the human within nature. Both the books deal with the passage of time, the unpredictability of places; a reflection on the fragility of life itself.

Artist Bio: Nidhi Khurana is an Indian artist and educator based in New Delhi. Her studio work takes the form of drawings, textiles, carpets, prints, artist-books, and sculptures to reflect upon the role of the human within nature. Nidhi was a Fellow Artist in Residence at The Institute of Advanced Studies, C.E.U, Budapest, Hungary (2023-24). She is the recipient of the Virtual Artist Residency 2024, at Batemans House lead by Newcastle University. 

Nidhi was born in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh and received an M.A from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, J. N. U., New Delhi. She completed her Bachelors in Visual Arts with a specialization in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.U., Baroda.

Dhon (Two) by Pretika Menon is an ongoing photographic project that explores the concept of home, focusing on Eugene D'Souza and her family in Moira, North Goa. Shot over three years, the project captures familial bonds and nostalgia within a century-old house. The work blends candid moments and staged scenes, using analog photography to evoke timelessness. Menon’s deep connection with Eugene, her twin daughters, and aging mother-in-law allowed for an authentic portrayal of their lives. Recognized with awards like the PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant and Umrao Sher Gil Grant, Dhon (Two) highlights Goa’s irreplaceable heritage. The project culminated in a February 2024 exhibition at Goa Open Arts, with plans for a photo book. Through Dhon (Two), Menon reflects on the role of place, memory, and tradition in shaping identity and belonging, offering a poignant meditation on the enduring power of home in a rapidly changing world.  

Artist Bio: Pretika Menon is a multi disciplinary artist and lens- based practitioner based in Goa. She has worked in fashion and fine art for over a decade. Inspired by cinema, street life and childhood stories, her works captures the dramatic in the everyday for her characters. Her fine-art painterly aesthetics encompasses mise-en-scène with undertones of humour, intrinsically weaving boldness and the surreal into the fabric of the post colonial cultural identity.

Her works explore themes of belonging, community and identity. Pretika has won the 2023 PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant for Dhon (Two).

In February 2024 she received the Umrao Singh Sher Gil Grant for Photography for the 2nd part of her project “Dhon” (Two).

Rock Paper Scissors is both archive and a response to the archive. Using documents, drawings, text and photographs, the book experiments with and speculates on questions around history – What is history? Who does it belong to? Who writes history and for whom?

The archive includes documents from the personal collection of Charan Dass Bangia, a partition refugee from Jaranwala Mandi (Lyallpur, Pakistan) who finally settled in Amritsar, India. Response to the archive includes an essay, dramatised dialogues, fabulated letters and poetic responses. They weave in and out of dates, numbers and characters in the documents, much like silverfish metabolising the archive leaving gaps and memory holes in their tracks.

Moving through the book, you encounter paper tears and trails, a multilingual ghost, bureaucrats in Safari Suits and voices that are as brittle as the paper you write on.

Artist Bio: Priyanka works as an artist, film director and editor based out of Delhi. Her practice explores notions of home, memory, landscape and relationships of people to places. Her recent work focuses on reconciling memories and experiences of the Partition of Punjab (1947). Rock Paper Scissors is the third iteration of a trilogy of works around the Partition, including Pichla Varka (The Previous Page, 2019) and Iqraar-naama (The Agreement, 2022). Her interest in the Partition of Punjab emerges from growing up in a family of partition refugees in West Delhi.

Safarnamas is a set of three self-published travel journals: Hollow, Remains of A Revolution and Life Is For Lovers, which inspect life lived in the shadow of violence – in a city (Phnom Penh, Cambodia) recovering from the reign of the dreaded Khmer Rouge; a square in the heart of a capital (Cairo, Egypt) that raised a slogan for freedom; and a picturesque winter resort enveloped in snow in a strife-ridden state (Kashmir, India) to take note of what one encounters travelling as a tourist through these conflict zones.

My other journals span from different points in time. Various artists use the book form differently; some use it to articulate a finished project, while others see it as an art object. I mostly use it for reflection and note-keeping. One can go through a book repeatedly, flip through it, see it at one’s own pace, hold it or keep it away. Books grow on you, and you grow with them.

Artist Bio: Uzma Mohsin uses photography to unravel narratives of people and places. She is interested in how photography helps open conceptual and creative possibilities for critically examining public histories and building a conversation around the idea of home and belonging.

Some of her recent exhibitions include ‘India today’, organised by Ente Regionale per il Patrimonio Cultural del Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy (2023-24), Kaghazi Pairahan: Publishing & Resistance in South Asia, at Double Dummy, Arles, France (2023) and the Maze Collective Studio Showcase, as part of a Wet Plate Collodion process residency programme, New Delhi, India (2022). She received the Alkazi Foundation Grant for Documentary Photography in 2017.

An alumni of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, she lives between New Delhi and Aligarh.