Mohit Shelare (born 1992, Nagpur, India; lives in Delhi, India) develops his work from a rethinking of impurity as a philosophical ground. His work engages waste and toxins as an emergent commons of the contemporary world and situates these materials not as excess but as constitutive of an ontological shift. Moving across drawing, performance, text, moving image, objects, and conversational settings, Shelare’s practice unfolds beyond conventional notions of environment, elaborating nonsensory modes of living that unsettle historical fictions of impurity while reconfiguring the very systems of thought through which the world is imagined. Shelare has exhibited at Watermans, London; Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; FICA, Delhi; Kunst(Zeug)Haus, Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland; CAMP Studio, Mumbai; and the Kochi-Muziris Students’ Biennale, Kerala, India. He has received the Prince Claus Seed Award (Netherlands) and Inlaks Fine Art Award (India) and support from the Regional Art Assembly (Australia), Five Million Incidents (India), Generator Experimenter (Kolkata), and India Foundation for the Arts (Bengaluru). He currently teaches as visiting faculty at the National Institute of Design, Kurukshetra.
