Sumesh Sharma (1983) is a curator informed by alternate art histories that often include cultural perspectives informed by socio-economics and politics. Immigrant Culture in the Francophone, Vernacular Equalities, Movements of Black Consciousness in Culture are his areas of interest. He co-founded the Clark House Initiative in 2010.

Sharma’s Masters in Research at the Université Paul Cézanne (2008) was an Inquiry into Artist Careers, and he was part of the Gwangju Biennale Curators Course 2010 as well as the first Independent Curators International’s Curatorial Intensive in Bombay. He has been a resident at ISCP New York (2012), Kadist Art Foundation Paris (2013) and the Manifesta Online Residency (2013), Casa Masaccio Tuscany (2013), San Art – Ho Chin Minh City Vietnam (2014), and Para Site Hong Kong (2014). He is presently one of the curators of of Dak’Art 2016, Senegal and was ICI’s 2014 Curatorial Fellow Sumesh Sharma in Senegal, where he researched how the funding mechanisms in culture and institutional support of art institutions utilise the power structures put in place by colonial laws.

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The Clark House Initiative, established in 2010 by Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma, is a curatorial collaborative 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. The 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.