Asia Society Arts Game Changer Awards | How CAMP is reworking the rules

At a clip erstwhile the aboriginal progressively feels similar a repetition of the past, the thought of “game changing” demands scrutiny. On societal media, comparisons betwixt 2026 and 2016 circulate with uneasy familiarity: from resurgent authoritarianism to civilization wars, and individuality authorities implicit visibility and speech. It is precisely this anxiousness that gives the Asia Society Arts Game Changer Awards their urgency.

Instituted by Asia Society India, the awards were conceived to recognise practices that person shifted however creation is made, circulated, and understood crossed South Asia. The award’s accent is deliberate: idiosyncratic excellence, erstwhile the superior currency of taste recognition, has revealed its limits successful an progressively unequal satellite shaped by infrastructure, technology, and access, necessitating collaboration crossed disciplines.

This year’s awardees underline that shift. The 2026 cohort includes Sri Lankan creator Hema Shironi, whose textile-based signifier stitches unneurotic post-war memory, Tamil identity, and anti-colonial resistance; Kulpreet Singh, a Punjab-based farmer-artist whose soot drawings look straight from agrarian situation and clime catastrophe; Raghu Rai, whose six-decade photographic archive has shaped however India remembers itself; and CAMP (Critical Art and Media Practices), whose enactment spans film, surveillance, and unfastened integer archives.

‘Art arsenic thing to inhabit’

Among them, what makes CAMP’s signifier peculiarly fascinating is its irreverence for prescribed definitions of form, format, media, and creation itself. Founded successful Mumbai successful 2007 by Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran, the collaborative workplace has spent astir 2 decades moving crossed moving-image practice, technological systems, pedagogy, and semipermanent nationalist infrastructure. Their projects see Pad.ma, an open-access online archive of documentary footage, and Indiancine.ma, a collaboratively built database of Indian cinema that functions arsenic some archive and probe commons.

Neither level operates arsenic a neutral repository. As Anand puts it, “We said ‘infrastructure’ agelong earlier it became a connection successful creation oregon anthropology. Within 3 months of starting CAMP, Pad.ma was launched, and it already brought unneurotic and belonged to a larger assemblage than us.”

What distinguishes CAMP’s signifier is not standard oregon novelty, but method. From the outset, they were responding to a circumstantial acceptable of conditions. In the mid-2000s, India’s modern creation marketplace was expanding rapidly, absorbing visibility and capital, portion documentary filmmakers faced shrinking accumulation spaces, constricted distribution, and expanding censorship. “We came from a clip erstwhile the Internet felt similar a forest. A spot to hide, organise, to physique autonomously. We besides assumed airwaves, energy arsenic escaped media, arsenic commons,” she explains.

CAMP emerged astatine this intersection with a wide proposition: if existing structures could not clasp definite kinds of work, those structures had to beryllium rethought oregon built anew. “Art wasn’t thing to bent connected a wall. It was thing you could inhabit. Something that could beryllium wrong systems — archives, cities, surveillance — alternatively than conscionable correspond them,” says Sukumaran.

Shaping however images circulate

Central to CAMP’s reasoning is simply a refusal to abstracted creation from its conditions. Filmmaking, gathering archives, oregon intervening successful surveillance systems are treated arsenic creator acts due to the fact that they signifier however images circulate and who gets to spot them. “The enactment mightiness instrumentality the signifier of filmmaking, oregon gathering an archive — but the method, the commitment, is art,” says Anand. This presumption besides explains CAMP’s absorption to being framed arsenic an “artist collective”. The term, they argue, often replicates the logic of idiosyncratic authorship nether a shared name. Instead, they dainty collaboration arsenic an progressive process that is negotiated, strategic, and often risky.

Working with CCTV operators successful the U.K., Palestinian families filming their ain neighbourhoods successful East Jerusalem (Al Jaar Qabla al Daar), sailors documenting beingness crossed the Indian Ocean (From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf), oregon residents speechmaking Mumbai’s skyline done poesy (Bombay Tilts Down), CAMP repeatedly asks: who controls the image, who benefits from access? “There are already millions of cameras successful our cities. The creator question isn’t whether to bring different one, but to usage what’s already determination to amusement thing else,” says Sukumaran. By repurposing surveillance technologies, allowing cameras to observe neighbourhood beingness alternatively than defender backstage property, they interrupt the logic of the panopticon.

A shared commitment

Their attack extends cautiously to newer technologies. Rather than embracing claims of inevitability astir artificial intelligence, CAMP treats instrumentality tools arsenic situational: utile for translation, research, oregon archival labour erstwhile aligned with ethical intent, and resisted erstwhile they obscure accountability. “We don’t judge the existent usage of immoderate exertion arsenic its last destiny,” notes Sukumaran.

In this light, the Asia Society awards relation little arsenic endorsement than arsenic designation of sustained risk. Placed alongside Shironi, Singh, and Rai, CAMP’s signifier reveals a shared commitment: creation that stays adjacent to lived conditions alternatively than abstract trends. To “game change” art, then, is not to foretell the future, but to garbage its repetition. In a infinitesimal erstwhile the past threatens to instrumentality intact, CAMP’s enactment insists connected rebuilding the rules themselves.

Asia Society Arts Game Changer Awards volition beryllium presented connected February 6 successful New Delhi.

The essayist-educator writes connected culture, and is founding exertion of Proseterity — a literate arts magazine.