Artist in Residence, Stockholm, 15 November 2024–25 February 2025

Sandeep TK is an artist from Thalassery, Kerala. His mediums are photographs, videos, and text looking at the experiences of his queer class caste identity in the Indian context by positioning himself as someone who transcended class from a working-class background to an upwardly mobile circle and his interpersonal relationships and experience of this journey of fitting into a socially accepted legitimate culture of civilized.

Courtesy of Sandeep TK

Toy boy from Malabar and his Journey to Wine cheese and Choclates-2023

During his residency at IASPIS Sandeep TK will continue working on his project “Let me add something in my own melody” with the materials he collected from Basel mission archives in Switzerland. The Basel Mission was a Christian missionary operation, a European venture with all the imperial overtones of the time. But they did bring fresh eyes to the region and could see the situation of untouchable castes for what it was: oppression. And to the extent they were able to help, people were grateful, however much the exercise was propelled by the fervour of religious conversion and the civilising mission. Sandeep is someone from the same untouchable castes they affected. Sandeep found hundreds of letters written in Malayalam, from people in the Malabar region, recounting their experiences with the Mission. Sandeep, currently creating visual representations of these letters and playing with words he found in them, because sandeep found that much of the meaning expressed hundreds of years ago is still resonant and lends itself to a dramatic, poetic and poignant set of expressions.

Sandeep had his first solo exhibition, “Singularity,” at Gallery Sumukha Bangalore in 2018 and his second solo, “let me add something in my melody”, at Villa Renata Basel 2022, Switzerland.

Sandeep has been part of several group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the Empowerment at Kunst Museum Wolfsburg 2022-23, and his works have screened/shown part of several film festivals and photo festivals, including FIF – Belo Horizonte’s International Festival of Photography Brazil, KG+ Kyotography Japan, and Vantage Point, Sharjah. His videos have been showcased at The Palace International Queer Film Festival, Bristol; Bangalore Queer Film Festival; and Festival of Video Art by Indian Contemporary Artists. In 2020 Sandeep received the Inlaks fine art award, and he was part of Khoj peers residency in 2021 and the Prohelvetia Studio residency award in 2022 in Switzerland.

Sandeep is the recipient of Robert Bosch Crossing boarders Grant.