Vishwa Shroff’s (b.1980) artistic practice is firmly rooted in drawing, with a proclivity towards architectural forms that serve as compelling take-off points for a deeper contemplation on memory and our relationship with the material world. Her works seek to explore the narratives of lived experiences that lay embedded within surfaces. She started her artist training at The Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda in 1998. She continued on to the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design (UK) in 2003. Her career so far has seen eight solo exhibitions – Music of Buildings (2022), Folly Measures (2019) curated by Veerangana Solanki at TARQ; In Residence (2018) curated by Rose van Mierlo at Swiss Cottage Gallery, London (UK); Drawn Space (2016) curated by Charlie Levine at TARQ; Postulating Premises (2015) at TARQ; One Eye! Two Eyes! Three Eyes! (2012) at the Acme Project Space, London (UK) and Memories of a Known Place (2012) at Trove Gallery, Birmingham (UK).
Shroff was part of TARQ’s presentation Building Artefacts at Art Basel Hong Kong (2018), Art Mumbai (2024) and India Art Fair (2024, 2022, 2017). She recently concluded a residency at the Stiftung Laurenz Haus, Basel, Switzerland (2021-2022) and has also participated in residencies like Swiss Cottage Library, London, UK (2017); Paradise Air, Matsudo, Japan (2015); was an international associate artist at ACME studios, London, UK (2011) and a researcher in residence at Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan (2010).
Besides participating in artist residencies all over the world, Shroff has also been a part of group exhibitions such as Unhoming: Fragile Belonging curated by Deeksha Nath, Exhibit 320, New Delhi (2024); Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2024); From Holbein to Trockel: Highlights from the Kupferstichkabinett at KunstMuseum, Basel Switzerland (2024); Mycelial Legacies ll at Jehangir Nicholson Gallery, Mumbai (2023); Sublime Transferences at Emami Art in Kolkata (2021); The Show Windows at the Coventry City of Culture Trust in U.K (2021); Looking and Longing, Curating the Domestic at StudioELL in New York (2020); Distilled Blueprints at Space Studio in Vadodara (2019); 100 Years of Bauhaus at Wurttembergisher Kunsverein in Stuttgart, Germany (2018); A Language of Form- Records of Time Tracing with Exhibit 320, Delhi (2020); Bedroom Spaces at Hospital Club, UK (2019) and Camden Draw at Swiss Cottage Library, London (2017).
Shroff has engaged in multiple workshops and talk series in the Urban Design and Architecture section of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival at the Goethe Institut, curated by Kaiwan Mehta at Max Mueller Bhavan (2017); Prototype City as part of the UK City of Culture Program at the British Council, Coventry (2021); VishwaShroff: Works at School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai, India (2019); Varied Perspectives and Practice of the Book at TARQ, Mumbai (2015).
Shroff was a recipient of the 2011 UNESCO Aschberg Bursary for artists and more recently, received the Jusoken Housing Research Grant (Japan, 2020) to study Bombay Art Deco kitchens, along with her long term collaborator Katsushi Goto with whom she has also co-authored a publication titled Duality in Drawing for The International Symposium of Architectural Interchanges in Asia (2016) and has designed the stage layout concept for Guards at Taj (2017), a play directed by Danish Hussein. Shroff is a co-founder of SqW:Lab, an experimental workshop focusing on Drawing and the Domestic. With SqW:Lab, Shroff published Play Projects x Jyoti Bhatt, Play Projects from the Artist’s Diaries, a book endeavour inspired by a collection of pages from an eminent Indian artist Jyoti Bhatt’s diaries.
Vishwa Shroff is represented by TARQ. She currently lives and works in Mumbai.