creating a Museum-Quality Visual Archive of Indo-European critical Heritage
A growing archive of drawings, paintings, digital works, films, and photographs documenting and interpreting the architectural legacy of Indo-European critical heritage.
John Xaviers Arackal, PhD is a writer/artist building a museum-quality visual archive of Indo-European critical heritage through photography, drawing, painting, filmmaking, digital art, and critical heritage research.
His professional and artistic practice spans contemporary art, curatorial work, research, teaching, and arts philanthropy. He was Assistant Curator of the 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018) and taught art theory to MFA students at Shiv Nadar University. He completed his PhD in Art Theory at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, under Prof. Parul Dave Mukherji. His curatorial and artistic projects have been presented at Mumbai Art Room, Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, Devi Art Foundation, and Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, among others. Since 2019, he has been serving as Programme Officer for the Arts Practice programme at India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore.
The archive approaches Indo-European heritage not as an exercise in colonial nostalgia, but as a field of critical fabulation through speculative draftsmanship and essay forms. It examines architectural forms and their surroundings that emerge from encounters between Indian and European artistic and architectural traditions, and the changing meanings these forms acquire in the present.
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