10 July 2026
Artist Highlight - Atimanyu Vashishth
Interview and Review
Atimanyu Vashishth is an artist and architect. He holds a Master of Fine Arts (Distinction) from the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture, London, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Sir JJ College of Architecture, Mumbai. He currently serves as Course Master at the AA's Interprofessionals Studio, where he tutors post-graduate students in spatial performance and exhibition-making.
His practice spans devised screen prints, poetry, performance, and film. His performative showcases and screen prints have been exhibited across London, Lisbon, Istanbul, Tivoli, and Delhi. His short film रक़ीब; Raqeeb received an Honorable Mention at the Pollen: Video Spells Avant-Garde Film Festival and was selected as Pick of the Day by Labocine. Atimanyu is also a published poet, and his poems have been published by Bog Bodies Press, Poems India Magazine, Guy Kojak Magazine and several independent literary journals.
ARTIST INTERVIEW
1. Not an Innocent Hole gives a small hole in a plasterboard wall a strange sense of importance. What interested you in treating such a minor architectural detail as a subject?
Life is made lived-in by little things. Imperfect little things. Car keys forgotten in the fridge. A fly stuck in the ointment. The bittersweet taste of the butt-end of a cucumber. Life is also a place where reconciliation is almost always possible, well, within reason. I reckon ‘Not an Innocent Hole’ with its imperfect tranquillity, somehow gets away with being a symbol for that. These philosophical nothings aside, my motivation to make the screen prints also stemmed from having had a rough understanding of how I would make them, and a childlike curiosity and enthusiasm to discover what the prints might actually look like.
2. The title suggests that the hole is not as neutral as it appears. What kind of innocence is being questioned in the work?
The hole, in fact is exceptionally neutral. It’s just a hole. In saying so, I of course am not disregarding the history behind the hole. Something or someone ought to have made it. The prints themselves, however, consider the moment where someone; a character, mulls over the hole. The scribbled text in the prints would even suggest that this character is obsessing over it. Obsessions in and of themselves are not particularly positive, but I think, taking a moment or some moments, to obsess over a mere hole in a plasterboard wall, to be captivated by it, to even fetishise it, in the grand scheme of things does require a sense of innocence.
3. You describe the hole as almost mythical. How does the work move from a simple physical mark into something more symbolic?
The hole is a museum of hypothetical lifetimes. At the same time, it is sheer nonsense. Reading the text with the image, the image itself, the background, the foreground, the misregisters and misprints, the viewer is tempted to consider what manner of living the maker of the hole or the author of the text were up to. For that matter are they even the same individual… that is if either of them is a reliable narrator. The hole hence makes one consider empathy without being too on the nose about it.
4. Your practice often looks at ordinary human behaviour with both tenderness and absurdity. How does this piece reflect that way of looking?
Through my practice I present narratives that remind us we all pick our noses, we all practice presentations in our respective showers; we all behave, are animate, raw and utterly beautiful. The hole itself, the prints, the way they’ve been made, they’re full of traces, things and situations that were and are not so ideal, and yet they’re there. They’re real. There’s even a contentment in just looking at the ripped off plaster. To stare into the little details. It’s similar to running your finger over the scar tissue of an old wound you got playing in the playground perhaps.
5. A hole can suggest damage, curiosity, access, secrecy, or desire. Which of these readings felt most important while making the work?
Having now looked at the prints a number of times, whilst pondering over all these questions, I would go ahead and say that if the cups and the saucers, the tea kettle, the shelves behind the hole itself, if they were not in pristine condition, orderly stacked, with a hint of ‘lived-in ness’ (a bowl not centred on the plate it is kept on) I would not have been so intrigued by the hole and would have not considered making the prints perhaps. This particular hole has deftness and tact. It is serene in an underwhelming and bacchanalian sort of a way.
6. The scale of the piece gives a small everyday incident a much larger presence. How does enlargement change the emotional or comic weight of the image?
Screen prints tend to be flat, or rather they do not translate depth or distance well. The size of the piece is, hence, partially motivated by the desire to have the cups and saucers, plates and the kettle in the background to be as close to the 1:1 scale as possible. The resultant enlargement creates a space which allows me as an artist to breathe. Rather than being too precious and pedantic about achieving a petite little image, I gave myself more room for play. I was able to test and try approaches, make visible errors, embrace them and allow them to embellish each print in the series differently.
7. Within The Strange Everyday, your work turns a small imperfection in a wall into something charged and theatrical. What do you hope viewers reconsider about the overlooked details around them?
In all honesty, I wouldn’t want to want to make people to reconsider anything. Being able to capture an image of a seemingly curated hole in a plasterboard wall, and making screen prints of the same, do register a certain manner of privilege. And I am quite aware of it. If anything, I suppose, I would hope that people don’t get too caught up in the grandiosity of things, their narratives, and remember that even if one is out saving the world, or even dooming it, one does take a beat to use the facilities, to take a shit. That’s the truth about our ‘everyday’.
LOOKING TOO LONG
Review by Sara Chyan, Curator
Atimanyu Vashishth begins with a hole in a plasterboard wall that most people would probably pass without a second look. Through it, we can see a cupboard, stacked plates, cups and a kettle. The objects behind the wall are surprisingly orderly. It is the torn edge around them that disturbs the scene.
The photograph has been enlarged so that the objects appear close to their actual size. This changes the way the image is encountered. We are not looking down at a small record of damage. The opening stands in front of us, almost like a narrow entrance into someone else’s domestic space.
Atimanyu describes the hole itself as neutral. Something made it, but the work gives us no evidence of what happened. The suspicion comes from the title and from the attention placed around it. Once the hole has been photographed, enlarged, printed and written over, it becomes difficult to believe that it means nothing.
Handwritten fragments appear around the image like thoughts that have not been fully resolved. They do not explain the scene. Instead, they make us aware of someone continuing to examine it, perhaps for longer than necessary. The work is partly about the hole, but it is also about the person who cannot stop thinking about it.
The screenprinting process prevents the image from becoming too clean. Halftone patterns shift, sections fall out of register and the ink does not settle in exactly the same way across the series. Atimanyu allows these differences to remain. Each print feels like another attempt to approach the same minor event, without getting any closer to an answer.
There is a risk in giving so much importance to something so ordinary. The title, scale and handwritten notes all encourage us to search for a hidden history. Atimanyu seems aware of this. The work has enough humour to acknowledge that the entire investigation may be unnecessary, even slightly ridiculous.
That self-awareness keeps the piece from becoming too precious. The cupboard remains a cupboard, and the hole never reveals who made it or why it is there. By the end, I still know almost nothing about what happened. I only know how easy it is to keep looking.