Founded in 2010, a union of artists based in Bombay
Clark House Initiative is a curatorial collaborative and a union of artists based in Bombay, established in 2010 by Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma concerned with ideas of freedom. Strategies of equality have informed their work, while experiments in re-reading of histories, and concerns of representation and visibility, are ways to imagine alternative economies and freedom. Clark House Initiative intends to actively recall political and artistic figures into contemporaneity and to question the recent rise of fascism in India based on exaggerated rumours of economic prosperity and nationalist pride.
Membership arises from basic tenets of humanism – Friendship, Anti-Racism, Sexual Freedom, Anti-Homophobia, Anti-Islamophobia, Feminism, Secularism and understanding the project of Modernism as an economic and political reality outside the occident. 17 artists run the union that gathers many more and are based across many seas. Nikhil Raunak + Sachin Bonde, Rupali Patil + Prabhakar Pachpute, Amol Patil + Poonam Jain & Yogesh Barve, who together became the artist collective Shunya in 2011, were the founding artists and are the permanent members of the Clark House.