After obtaining a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Management from the European Business School in London, Anupam Poddar completed a Professional Development Programme for hotel management at Cornell University. He has been actively involved with the development of Devi Garh – a restored all suite boutique hotel within an 18th century fort-palace, located outside the city of Udaipur in Rajasthan, India. Devi Resorts has opened two boutique hotels named Devi Ratn and Rasa in Jaipur in 2011. The Devi Design Studio, established and run by Anupam, specialises in designing products in a range of materials and techniques that reflects the craft traditions of India and their application in our modern day lifestyles. Anupam is instrumental in setting up the not-for-profit Devi Art Foundation, in Gurgaon, along with his mother, Lekha Poddar. The Foundation invites curators to select works from the family’s extensive collection of contemporary art from the Indian Subcontinent and the rest of Asia, to host an exhibition a year. The Foundation, which has emerged from this dynamic Collection, is committed to providing a space for young artists experimenting with new ideas, without the imposition of commercial limitations. To further comprehensive engagement and understanding, The Devi Art foundation organises a series of lectures, talks, and artists’ interaction is designed around each exhibition, which is open to a broad spectrum of audiences.

Sheela Gowda, a trained painter, works with a variety of media and material. Not only at the level of imagery but also while testing her own conceptions and pre-conceptions, work by work, Sheela is enquiring into cultural, societal materials and what they could be saying beyond their everyday presence and function. She has had solo exhibitions at INiVA, London; NAS Gallery, Sydney; OCA, Oslo; GallerySKE, Bangalore, and at Bose Pacia Gallery, New York. Recent international exhibitions include Documenta 12, 2007; Lyon Biennale 2007; Reflections of Contemporary India, Madrid, Spain; Sharjah Biennale 2008; Santhal Family - Positions Around an Indian Sculpture, MuKHA, Antwerp, Belgium, 2008; 53rd Venice Biennale 2009; Indian Highway, Serpentine Gallery, London 2008-09; Singapore Biennial 2011 and Biennale Jogja XI, 2011. A major exhibition of her works will open at the Vanabbe Museum, Eindhoven, Netherlands in February 2013. Sheela Gowda lives and works in Bangalore

Mirjam Varadinis is an art historian, curator and writer based in Zürich, Switzerland. She has been a curator at Kunsthaus Zürich for the past ten years. Responsible for contemporary art at the Kunsthaus, Mirjam has curated many exhibitions including Aleksandra Mir: Switzerland and Other Islands (2006), Shifting Identities (2008), and Motion Picture(s) (2010). Mirjam has also co-curated the exhibition Broken Lines as a part of the annual art festival ‘Printemps de Septembre’ (2006) in Toulouse, France. She has edited ‘Parkett: 20 Years of Artists’ Collaborations’. As a curator she has many solo exhibitions to her credit, such as those of Rosa Barba, Adrian Paci, Mircea Cantor, Runa Islam, Tino Sehgal, Erik van Lieshout, Aleksandra Mir, Nedko Solakov, Urs Fischer, David Shrigley to name a few. In 2012, she co-curated ‘TRACK’ in Ghent (Belgium), together with Philippe Van Cauteren. In 2005 she launched the internet-platform www.azple.com in collaboration with Annie Wu.

William Kentridge’s work has been seen in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s, including Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1997, 2003, 2012), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1998, 2010), the Albertina Museum in Vienna (2010), Jeu de Paume in Paris (2010). Kentridge’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute was presented at Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, Festival d’Aix, and in 2011 at La Scala in Milan. He directed Shostakovich’s The Nose for the Met Opera in New York in 2010 (the production traveled to Festival d’Aixand to Lyon in 2011), to coincide with a major exhibition at MoMA. Also in 2010 the Musee du Louvre in Paris presented Carnets d’Egypte, a project conceived especially for the Egyptian room at the Louvre. In the same year, Kentridge received the prestigious Kyoto Prize in recognition of his contributions in the field of arts and philosophy. In 2011, Kentridge was elected as an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and received the degree of Doctor of Literature honoriscausa from the University of London. The 5-channel video installation The Refusal of Time was made for Documenta (13) in Kassel, Germany, in 2012. Also in this year, he presented the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University; was elected member of the American Philosophical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and was awarded the Dan David Prize by Tel Aviv University.