Oorja Garg is a curator currently based between New York and New Delhi. Her practice moves between research, exhibition-making, and critical writing, foregrounding speculation, archives, and play as curatorial methods. She examines how contemporary art engages science, fiction, games, and popular culture to question dominant narratives of technology, identity, and history. Garg holds dual master’s degrees in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts and in Art History from the MS University of Baroda.
Thank you for joining us, Oorja. Can you introduce yourself and share a bit about how your curatorial practice has developed across New Delhi and New York?
I am an independent curator from New Delhi. My journey started with research around popular Indian culture, beginning with contemporary artists whose practices engaged with it during my time studying Art History at MS University of Baroda. I have worked with contemporary art galleries, not for profit institutions, art fairs, and artist collectives while continuing to focus on my research.
My practice involves challenging disciplinary boundaries, political hegemonies, gathering new skills and interactive participation while space making. It is a process that germinates through action first, followed by theoretical grounding in the present moment. As they say, a curator has to wear multiple hats, collecting skills is central to my practice, even seemingly minor ones like being able to install an exhibition. Hands-on tasks have become just as important as research.
One of my first exhibitions in New York, at the SVA MA Curatorial Practice, centred around my developing interest in games and their ability to offer sustained interaction between audiences and exhibition interfaces. Besides being an avid gamer, I had to learn an entirely new vocabulary through game studies.
I then curated Radial Minds at a former NYPD Counter Terrorism Task Force training facility that explored astrobiology and aliens. I learnt to stargaze with the Amateur Astronomers Association in New York, watched early science fiction films to understand how the alien has been imagined in popular culture, and began conversations with astrobiologists and anthropologists to better understand the discipline. As an immigrant in the US, questions of the “other,” alongside the ICE crisis and violence against people of colour, made the exhibition even more personally relevant.
I have also curated shows at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, CUE Art Foundation and Eugenia Espacio in Mexico City in the last year. Recently, I was a part of Asia Art Archive in America’s Leadership Camp where I revisited my research on primary school educational charts printed from the 1960s onwards.
Your curatorial work engages deeply with research and interdisciplinary methodologies. How do you develop the conceptual framework for an exhibition, and at what point does that framework begin to be shaped by the artists themselves?
It usually begins with research and a preliminary list of artists, who may or may not end up in the final exhibition. This list constantly contracts and expands as my research develops and as I begin conversations with peers, who often introduce me to new artists and ideas.
I also build connections through images, expanding my visual vocabulary by looking across different time periods and disciplines. For Radial Minds, for example, the exhibition’s visual language was informed by the evolution of the alien in popular culture, asteroid mining technologies, astronomical imagery, studies of extremophiles, and, as I mentioned earlier, learning to observe the movement of celestial bodies through stargazing. These became the visual and conceptual precursors that helped me clarify both the exhibition’s framework and the artists whose practices resonated with it.
Slow curating, with its emphasis on building long term relationships, research, and creating spaces for the same, remains fundamental to the way I work. At the same time, I constantly visit artists’ studios. That process is never separate from the research. It unfolds organically alongside it. The conceptual framework continues to evolve through conversations with artists, whose perspectives often reshape the exhibition in unexpected ways.
Your recent work has engaged with South Asian artistic voices and themes including caste, colonialism, and partition. How does that context inform the way you approach curatorial projects, and does it influence what you look for in an emerging artist’s work?
My political commitments consciously or unconsciously seep into my practice. I often find myself gravitating towards artists and thinkers who dismantle hierarchical structures.
As a South Asian woman who grew up in New Delhi, I have been exposed to mass gatherings and protests, including the pre pandemic Shaheen Bagh movement in 2019 and the farmers’ protests. At the same time, I continue to be inspired by B. R. Ambedkar’s writings on caste in India. These become sites that are more than simply acts of protest. They create entirely different worlds and possibilities.
Through my education in India and conversations with peers, these concerns became central to the way I think. Around them lies the possibility of thinking collectively, where shared action and vision create spaces of care and solidarity. Even when I am not working with artists who address these subjects directly, these underlying political concerns and affiliations often remain present.
I recently co curated On Absence at the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which more directly engaged with these ideas by exploring different manifestations of absence. One of the works, by Payal Arya, traced her grandmother’s migration from Pakistan to India during Partition by returning to her ancestral home in Lahore. Another work, by Yogesh Barve, presented Dr. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste in a four day time loop that ran continuously for six months, reflecting on the simultaneous absence, miscomprehension, and unrealized manifestation of his writings within contemporary India.
More recently, I moved back to India after three years in New York, a decision I made because I wanted to engage more directly with South Asian politics on the ground. Currently, I am working on creating a network of young curators, engaging in questions that inform artistic practices from the subcontinent.
As a juror for Third Space Is a Verb what qualities do you hope to find in submissions from artists exploring hybridity, belonging, and transformation? Are there ways of approaching these themes that feel fresh or underexplored to you right now?
Homi Bhabha’s writings are significant to postcolonial studies, and as someone from a country that continues to live with the afterlife of colonialism, the theme of this open call feels deeply personal. When you proposed the idea of the Third Space as a verb, I was excited by the possibility of having these conversations in New York and seeing how artists respond to it.
The Third Space is one of constant renegotiation, not a simple mixture but a complex ideological network. As a verb, it becomes a site where language and visualities not only collide but transform one another. It is not a midpoint between two cultures. It could be any point of encounter. It embodies what Bhabha describes as a continual state of becoming, and I think it is an important way to rethink South Asian identity today.
In my own curatorial practice, I am increasingly moving away from questions of cultural representation towards creating conditions of encounter. I am interested in artists who create situations where new meanings emerge rather than simply represent existing identities.
What does community mean to you, and how has it informed your curatorial thinking and the relationships you build around a project?
At the moment, I am really enjoying the space of co curating. My last four exhibitions, as well as this open call, have all emerged from sustained conversations. These exhibitions manifested after months of research. Sharing responsibility, organisation, and decision making with someone else is both the most rewarding and the most challenging part of curatorial work. It has strengthened my interpersonal relationships and made me more attentive to others.
My closest friends are also my peers. We are in constant dialogue about one another’s practices, creating a network that both supports and challenges my ambitions. These relationships have become the bedrock of my practice across both New Delhi and New York.
One such encounter took shape in 203/H: The Collector, which developed after a year of reading The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin as part of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program. The exhibition was self organized as a collective effort at CUE Art Foundation, culminating in a symposium that extended Benjamin’s text into the contemporary moment through artistic and theoretical inquiry.
In March 2026, Time is a Body emerged in Mexico City from two years of dialogue with Mexican curator Amado Cabrales around our shared interest in instruments that measure time. The exhibition brought together artists from India and Mexico whose works punctured standardized notions of time, creating their own temporal rhythms that spanned billions of years, geological time, and historical time.
For artists who are preparing proposals or open call submissions, what advice would you offer on how to communicate their ideas clearly and compellingly to a juror?
I enjoy working with artists who experiment across different materialities, images, and references, and who are able to bring these elements together into a coherent visual language.
For me, the context of the work is much more important than what one can see on the surface. A proposal does not have to be complex if the thinking behind it is clear. As Bhabha reminds us, the Third Space is something you do rather than somewhere you are. Ultimately, clarity of thought stays with me long after I have left the work.
text & photo courtesy of Oorja Garg
- Instagram: @oorjag
